


Where the Wild Rain Falls

by Major



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst, Drama, Gen, Horror, M/M, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-03
Updated: 2017-06-24
Packaged: 2018-11-08 13:49:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 27,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11082873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Major/pseuds/Major
Summary: A storm comes in on the night of the parent-teacher conferences at Riverdale High.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Dylan McKay and Billy Loomis together in the same universe? What a great idea. Gave my 90's heart palpitations seeing the casting. So my love of horror, nostalgia, and Riverdale combined to come up with this.
> 
> This story is complete and revised and will be four chapters long. I plan to upload a new chapter every weekend as I have time to finish final edits. Canon compliant up until S1E10 "The Lost Weekend" and diverges from there.
> 
>  **Warnings:** Please note that this is horror. Rated M for language, dark themes, horror, violence, gore, and possible character death(s).

Fred stood at the window while the five o'clock news reported the weather. He squinted at the sky. The clouds were starting to roll forward across the sun, shading it out behind greys that darkened and eventually went black the farther back they stretched. Thunderheads were building and making the lazy crawl to Riverdale while Jeffery Desson promised strong showers and a temperature drop overnight.

He flipped off the TV, tossed the remote, and grabbed his jacket on the way out the door. He didn't like driving in rain, but it looked like that was what he was in for on the ride home later. He handled the truck just fine, but rain made him a hundred percent more aware of other drivers on the road. On sunny days, he could drive for miles without thinking about driving. With his wipers on, he expected to be hit. Any moment, some poor kid with a learner's permit would panic at a lightning strike and swerve into him. Hadn't happened yet, but Fred learned early on to brace for impact anyway.

Music streamed out from the open garage as he made his way over. Archie was standing in front of the microphone stand he bought last weekend and singing a cover from one of the new guys always streaming on the radio these days whose name Fred could never remember. His voice rolled out over the lyrics like he wrote them for himself. He paused to listen, to wonder. Just for that chorus, hearing the song come out of his own son's mouth, he didn't care if Archie made a career of it. He was good.

Singing in the garage and knowing how good he was filled him with paternal pride that caught him off guard the way it always did. Not because he wasn't always proud of Archie, but because there was an Archie. He was a man with a son. It was yesterday that he had his own band, trying to figure himself out with his best friend at his side—or some collective amount of yesterdays that could no longer be added up, but in moments like this with the memory of cold soda in his hand and FP's brooding, lowered-lash smiles close enough to reach out and brush his fingertips across, he could swear it was just the one.

Jughead, sitting on a beanbag along the back wall, used an old wrench and pair of pliers to drum a background beat across the floor for his own contribution when, Fred guessed, Archie had been singing a little too long. The corner of Archie's lips curved upward into a smile as he stopped and glanced back at a steadily more restless Jughead, and yep. It could have been Fred and FP all those yesterdays ago.

"Hey, boys." He came up as Jughead was getting to his feet and telling Archie that if he ever needed a bad drummer, he was his guy.

"Hey, Dad. On your way out?"

"First meeting starts in twenty minutes." Parent-teacher conferences weren't the hardship he knew they were for other people. He lucked out. Archie was a good kid, was active, and was a persistent student if not always the fastest. "Don't worry. I plan to represent you in a way you would appreciate. I'm sticking to the facts: your grades, your schedule, extracurriculars. I will not bring up your mastery of the toilet by the age of four. The bedwetting was sporadic to nonexistent after that."

Archie turned that special shade of pink, tinged with the teenage defiant refusal to be embarrassed by their embarrassing parent while Jughead wrapped an arm around his shoulders and nodded his approval at Fred. "Dad humor usually helps me increase the wattage of my cringing, but I enjoy it coming from you."

Archie wasn't impressed with his encouragement. "That's just because you didn't have to hear it around the clock your whole life. The full effect wears off its appeal."

It was a split second, that was all, but Fred saw the flash of hurt in Jughead's eyes before they went immediately impassive again. The reminder that his own father wasn't around all that much, as innocuously as Archie meant it, was a press of a finger on an old bruise. Fred frowned but brought no attention to it. Jughead wouldn't have appreciated that.

Instead, he squeezed his shoulder, feeling protective in a way that pissed him off just a little bit, because it should have been FP here looking out for Jughead. FP had a hundred new leaves he had turned over, and each flipped right back with the gentlest breeze. Wasn't anything for it. The full weight of each yesterday settled back on his shoulders.

"I'll be back when the faculty is done praising me on how amazing my guidance of you two guys has been to produce such impressive kids." He slapped Archie's arm and gave Jughead a final squeeze before turning for his truck.

"Don't count on it," Jughead called after him. "Archie fell asleep in geometry last week."

Archie retorted, "Yeah, but that was accidental. When Mr. Kyle shook me awake, Jughead chose to lecture him on purpose about how he was interfering with my American right to protest against the alleged real-world application of mathematics for a future musician."

"Just looking out for you, man."

Fred shook his head. It was like looking through a kaleidoscope to the past where everything looked the same but just that little bit different, a chaos of colors, both beautiful and senseless.

"Thanks for the heads up." He opened the door to the truck and warned, "Looks like a storm is coming. I don't want you two going out tonight."

"We can still go up on the roof, right?" Jughead asked. "I made a lightning rod in shop class. Me and Archie were going to hold it up and see if it worked."

"Ha." Fred got in but as he was pulling out of the driveway, he hung his head out the window and added just in case, "No electrocuting yourselves for fun."

Archie was smiling, but Jughead was shooting him a sardonic frown of disapproval. "Why do you hate science?"

Fred suppressed a smile with a shake of his head and waved as he drove off for the school.

It was extremely gratifying to listen to Adam Ackerman battle it out with the English teacher about his son's poor behavior and even worse grades from outside the door on the plastic chair in the hall where he waited for his turn to go in. Ackerman had a nasty habit of hiring him for jobs just to scare the competition into lowering their prices, then dropping his crew last minute and using cheaper help for a lesser job. He wished the kid well despite Adam Jr. coming up more than once in bleacher reports from the boys when troublemakers and bullying tactics came up around pizza some nights. He was just a kid after all. His dad, on the other hand, could take the gut punch of the conference the same way he had to take the gut punch of him firing him before they even got going, on repeat.

Ackerman shot out of the door looking red around his thick neck and loosening the collar on his short sleeve, confetti spackled button-up shirt. He did a double take on Fred who looked up and offered an amiable smile. Realizing the disaster of his son's academic performance was overheard, he pointed at the door like Ms. Chase was a judge who just ruled him too incompetent to take the stand. Or raise a kid.

"Little Adam is first-string on the football team," he said. On some plane of existence, that must have been relevant. Fred blinked. "He'll get a scholarship. Never too early for scouts. You know how much money there is in players who get drafted early? Little Adam would get drafted early if he got drafted at all."

"Sure thing, Adam." He stopped himself from saying Big Adam, just barely.

Nodding and redder around the neck, Ackerman strutted off down the hallway, a tall hulk of a man, checking the piece of paper in his hand with the room number for his next scheduled meeting. Something told him that his frustration had not yet reached its peak or final stop.

Ms. Chase said Archie was a peach and Jughead had a big career in journalism ahead of him. Fred felt a little flushed himself, but it was entirely from pride.

The only hiccup came from Mr. Kyle who advised that he make sure Archie was getting enough sleep to stay awake and fully attentive in class. He also, quite dryly, advised that Jughead find an outlet for his passion for social activism. Fred managed to keep a straight face and give a solemn nod. They were both passing with a high A and B, respectively, so he'd reprimand them with a large pizza and a case of root beer.

The sun was starting to go down as he checked his little square schedule with the final meeting printed off. It looked like it was starting to drizzle, so he popped open the umbrella he thought to bring in and stepped out to cross the quad from the main building over to the little square one that housed the offices of the coaches and athletic director. PE was the only area where Jughead was lagging a bit and Archie was far outshining him in both grade and performance. His square said Excels. Jughead's just had a handwritten note that said: See Coach Miller. Fred sighed.

He reached the canopy of the athletics building and lowered the umbrella to shake off when he pulled up short, almost colliding with someone approaching from the tunneled outdoor hall off to the other side. He stared for a moment in silent surprise at the figure in the day's receding light.

"Hey."

"Hey," FP replied, shrugging like Fred's eyes were already asking him a question he hadn't voiced yet.

"I didn't know you were coming." The school must have called him or sent a letter to his trailer that missed the Andrews' house by mistake, because as far as he knew, Jughead hadn't spoken to him in at least a few days.

FP jammed his hands in his pockets, and his shrug became more pronounced, tighter, more of a punctuation now. He was reminded of that teenage defiance he bumped into at home. "Yeah, well. I showed. That's more than anybody expected of me, right?"

That pained flash was still raw in Fred's memory. Jughead was FP's kid, and he knew it was rough for him to confront his own failures when it came to him and Jellybean, but that didn't shade over what Jughead had to carry every day because of those failures. As close as he was to Archie and living under his roof now, he was Fred's kid too.

"You want to say something, FP?" he asked, voice calm but firm in a challenge for something, anything in his own behavior that he would take issue with, compared to his own. "'Cause I'm right here, and I'm listening. Say something you think I need to hear."

FP stared at him for a long measured moment, and it could have fallen either way. With him, that was usually the hardest way. Fred waited for it. He would fight if an argument came, but he wasn't looking for that. It wasn't what he wanted. The scales tipped, and as he often did, FP surprised him.

"My kid's smarter than your kid, right?" He tipped his chin towards the building across the way where all of the initial meetings had taken place that he missed by showing up so late. A smile, tiny and knowing (no one knew FP's own failures with composure and judgment better than FP) tugged at one corner of his mouth.

Fred closed his eyes, exasperated and maybe a little worried to look too closely down that ever shifting kaleidoscope of their past, and pushed his shoulder towards the door without answering. Grades weren't a defining marker of a person. Besides, Fred had serious doubts about the real-world application of mathematics for a future musician.

He shook his umbrella out and paused as he was closing it, bringing it closer to inspect a couple tiny holes on one side. It was brand new. He just picked it up at the store last week.

"Hey, you coming?" FP had the door open, paused in the entrance, and held it open for him as he dismissed the tears, snapped the button on the umbrella's strap closed and walked in.

The building was small, only one level, with a single short hallway that was lined with tall lockers where the golf kids kept their clubs during the day on the right side and a series of five offices on the other.

"Jughead is first," Fred said, checking his watch as they came up to the second door down, and paused, not knowing what his place was there now that FP had turned up. Hesitating, he prepared to back off. "Do you want me to wait out here, or—"

"No." FP shook his head, looking away, and giving him that pinned down, dim eyed smile that was half-gone the second it appeared. "We'll both go. You see him more anyway. You might need to tell him something, or—" He ran a hand over his forehead and shrugged. "—whatever."

Fred felt that same jealous pang that he felt for Jughead earlier. The innocent, pained-hearted envy that Jug felt for a father that was always around came at him again from FP's envy that Fred could be the man that could be there when he never figured out how to do that himself.

He didn't bring attention to it. FP wouldn't like that. "Okay." He squeezed his shoulder briefly, and they went in.

Coach Miller commended him on a job well done with Archie ("Kid's got stamina! Real stamina! He's a protein shake and juicing scandal away from the big leagues, Andrews, lemme tell you.") but got a look like he was forcing down a jalapeño dipped in lemon juice sauce when the present topic of Jughead came along.

"What, he doesn't show up?" FP asked when Miller's gesturing and vague dissatisfaction had rounded into a point of needing to be more blunt to keep from making it personal soon.

That doubting look only creased the thick lines around his dry, flaking lips more. There was a piece of hard skin jutting off the cracked bottom one but instead of licking some moisture across it, he began to whittle the arrowed flake between his fingers like he was winding a watch.

"He shows," he said.

His frustration with whatever Jughead apparently lacked athletically boiled over into a befuddled look as he described Jug's limited enthusiasm for his physical education, as though approaching his general disinterest marked him as an alien, unknowable and strange to the man with the framed picture of Rocky Balboa on his wall and a poster taped to the door that said EAT. SLEEP. BENCH.

Miller frowned. "Jughead doesn't have any milk in his bones. Does the boy eat steak? What kind of grill do you have?"

Fred preferred Ms. Chase's assessment that Jug was a genius. His passivity towards _American Ninja Warrior_ hadn't impacted her Pulitzer fortune-telling. "The same one that feeds Archie."

Miller narrowed his eyes and seemed to shift his regard for him; didn't seem to be the type to trust a man who wouldn't reveal the make and model of his grill. Fred wondered where he stood on throwing vegetable kabobs on barbecue pits but thought it might offend his beliefs about the sacred protein space.

"Look," FP said, sitting up and leaning forward in the seat next to him across from Coach Miller at his desk. "Jughead is a smart kid. If he's showing up and doing what he's supposed to, I don't think there's a problem. Are you saying there's a problem?"

Miller stared at him attentively. FP stared back, and it was like being in a time warp. Fred didn't know how many times he was the subject caught inside the intensity of one of FP's unblinking stares. His gaze didn't watch; it burrowed, and it found new places to shine a light on even when you were trying to stutter-step those places back behind shadowed curtains, safely private in quiet recesses of your mind. FP saw it all anyway. Fred couldn't get out from under one of those stares.

And apparently, neither could Coach Miller. He sat back, threaded his fingers together, and simply said, "He's passing."

That wasn't Excels in a neat little box, but it was good enough.

"Good," FP said and took his leave.

"Thanks for your time," Fred said and shook Coach Miller's hand before following him out.

He half expected to see FP down the hall and pushing outside already, but he was standing across from the office as Fred pulled the door closed after him, leaning against the wall of lockers and waiting for him. Fred jammed his hands in the pockets of his jeans and went over.

"Jughead is going to be somebody. Not south side trash." FP pushed his hair out of his face and said with conviction that he never had for himself, "He's bigger than Riverdale."

Little Adam will be drafted early if he gets drafted at all! Maybe negative remarks about a man's son set off an automatic need to reassure and remind people that it wasn't all bad. He was willing to bet that Jughead had a lot more going for him than Big Adam's potential NFL prospect.

He wouldn't get an argument from him. "I know it."

"Yeah, course you do." And there was that spark of envy again that Fred understood and resented and wished away.

The key to being there for people was to be there. That was the whole secret. If he could press that trinket into FP's hand, he'd close his fist so tightly around it that it would stamp into his palm like a brand. But he gave up on depending on FP a long time ago. Unobserved, there was no one around to notice the spark of envy in his own eyes right then, jealous of people who had who they wanted without having to wonder where it fell apart somewhere on a backwards trip through the kaleidoscope before the colors all went dark.

In the quiet hall, the puttering fall of hard rain made the building feel even smaller inside and sheltered from the loud rage of it. It picked up since they came in, a hundredfold by the sound of it. There was an emergency door at the far end of the hall with a thick grey push bar and reinforced wired window, but the entrance door was glass with long, thin rectangular windows on either side of it. The rain was coming down in drumming sheets, white in the dim glow of the security lights that turned on when night finished falling and nearly black in its downpour when lightning flashed.

"You want to share that thing?" FP pointed at his umbrella.

Fred pretended to debate the idea. "I don't know if I have the incentive to share."

He played along, and that was something he missed. Having FP there to play along. "You always were a greedy bastard."

No, he wasn't.

"You going to make me walk in this?"

Fred tossed him a noncommittal glance as he started for the door. "What's in it for me?"

"My eternal gratitude? Not losing a soaking wet friend to electrocution?"

He really hoped the boys weren't on the roof with lightning rod hats on.

"Are we friends?" he asked skeptically.

Lightning flashed just as the overhead fluorescent lights flickered, and he got a glimpse of that burrowing stare. "Come on, Fred." His eyes dug around in dark recesses where they didn't have a right to be anymore. "We're always something."

There just wasn't always a name for it. They were often suspended between solid states, caught like vapor, bodiless and ever shifting, changing into something else.

"I'll share my umbrella," he said as the lights came back on, and with it, FP's focus pulled out and away.

"Very kind of you."

Just for that second, he wanted to step out on his own and leave him behind just to see that flicker of surprise on his face when Fred really did leave him to walk out alone. But Fred wasn't the guy that left people behind.

Fred got the door this time, pushing it open with his back as he stepped out and opened the umbrella underneath the roof's overhang.

A loud citywide text alert beeped from his pocket, and he paused as the door swept shut behind them to dig it out and check.

"What is it?" FP asked.

"Flash flood warning." He frowned out at the downpour. Wind was cutting it sideways in sheets and pelting drops across the concrete ahead of them.

"The boys know to stay out of this." It wasn't a question, but it was.

Fred nodded, reassuring him as much as himself. They were good kids who made mistakes, but not the type that got someone swept off the street when they were already warned.

"They do."

He put the phone away, but before they could step out, there was a long bellow weaving through the pound of water on rock that he almost mistook for the wind riling itself up into a roar. It took a second and a raise in pitch for him to place it as a scream.

"The hell?" FP stepped forward, but Fred cut an arm across his chest, stopping him as he stared down to the side where the rain was pelting the pavement. What he initially accepted as normal misting as the drops hit and splotched outwards, his eyes adjusted to the darkness to reveal as something else. The ground was steaming where the rain touched it.

Looking out, he saw it everywhere, hard to see even when looking for it in the darkness but obvious with every sky brightening double flash of quick lightning strikes. Smoke was coming off the ground and in the places where it was already pooling instead of sinking away like a soft mist on the surface.

"It's hot," Fred said, voice flat as he stared out and tried to make sense of what his eyes were saying he was seeing.

"What?"

He lowered the arm from FP's chest and took a tentative step back towards the door, murmuring, "There's something wrong with the rain."

Just then, another noise, this one unmistakably a scream, sliced through the night, much closer than the last. They both startled as a figure ran out from the downpour under the cover of the roof and fell, shrieking like his esophagus was being ripped raw, to his knees. His umbrella tumbled from his hand where the wide black spread of it had been eaten away until there were only frayed bits of fabric clutching to the metal spider frame it was pulled across. For a moment, all he could do was boggle.

It was the high, throat-bleeding scream of pain, stretching out and out like a whistle from a pair of full lungs that need not inhale, that forcibly jogged him out of it. He recognized the guy. It was Hal Maddox. He showed up to Archie's games a few times last year and sat near him on the bleachers. He didn't have a kid on the team, but one of the cheerleaders was his daughter. Kiera or Kylie, something like that.

Nothing particular ever stuck out about him. He was Joe Regular. Had an office job, wore khakis, and swapped frustration about poorly executed plays. He was the type of person who existed only in Fred's periphery, a muted background player that he noticed when sharing an infrequent shallow conversation while their kids butted heads and shook pom poms. He noticed him now.

Maddox's scream got drowned out by the torrential pour, but even that fell away like static, leaving Fred in a muted world staring at Maddox's collapsed form in a bewilderment that couldn't quite tick over to horror because his eyes would not take the information it was receiving and transmit a comprehensible translation to his brain. For seconds that dropped away with a sticky, elongated slowness, he looked at Maddox's head but didn't know what he was seeing. When it clicked, he wished it hadn't.

He dropped the umbrella.

The entire left side of Maddox's scalp had slipped away from the skull and was hanging in melted strips from the base of his head. There was so much blood that only the patch of hair hanging from the flap of skin below his ear made the gruesome state of him make sense.

His stomach made a greasy rolling gulp, but he took a step towards him. This time, FP's arm shot up and caught him across the chest like a traffic barrier snapping quickly into place.

"Don't."

"We have to get him."

"Don't touch him."

Fred was about to push past him, but his hands paused on his arm without moving him out of the way when he noticed what FP had already seen. It was hard to see from the blood gushing down over his shoulders, but Maddox's clothes were being eaten away where they were rain soaked. Patches of his blue and white striped polo shirt were melting into his torso and sending wisps of hot steam up where the fabric was baked into the liquefying skin.

"Christ."

FP cuffed a fist around his arm and pulled on him until he got him to turn and start walking on his own. He pushed him back inside, and it might have been his imagination, but Maddox's screams seemed to overpower the storm as the door closed them up away from him.

"We need something," FP was saying to himself as he threw the door to the first office open and looked searchingly inside for half a beat, startling Alice Cooper who was in conference with the cheerleading coach, Hannah Lomen. Alice was quick to frown as always, and that staple of everyday normalcy was what shook Fred.

He slapped FP's arm and hurried over to Coach Miller's office, not bothering to knock or announce himself or snap _excuse me, we need your folding table because Hal Maddox is fucking melting outside_. He ran to the wall where he saw it and shoved the stacks of school issued gym t-shirts that were sitting on top of it onto the floor to an outcry of belligerent protests behind him. He shoved the table on its side, and FP helped click the legs down quickly to flatten it out. They each took an end, and Fred grabbed a pile of the shirts off the floor before they hurried out with it.

Miller yelled for them to stop, but Fred's ears were still ringing with the primal noise of Maddox's tortured cries. FP snapped at him to call 911.

"What's going on?" Alice asked in the hallway, but they rushed past EAT. SLEEP. BENCH. and ran for the door.

"Don't touch him," FP stressed again as he smacked the handle down and they shoved their way out.

There were things you were supposed to do with burns and things that would only make them much worse. In the white shock of seeing Maddox stumble out of the rain coming apart, Fred couldn't remember which was which and if any of it at all applied to the injuries he had suffered.

The door opened behind them as they dropped the table beside Maddox who was now slumped down on his side completely silent. Alice was walking out trying to see what they were doing.

"Stay inside, Alice!" he shouted over his shoulder.

Something in the foreign sounding panicked grip of his voice or the look of cold shaken confusion on his face stopped her in her tracks as suddenly as if a glass wall had erected an inch from her nose.

"Here." He tossed a handful of shirts to FP and began wrapping one around his own hand. "Use them to grab him and pull him up on the table. FP!" he snapped when he didn't budge, but instead of getting to it, he sat back on his heels and looked Fred in the eye.

He looked down at quiet Hal where the torn part of his scalp was resting red on white on the concrete and saw why he had stopped screaming. The rain was eating his throat. Where his Adam's apple used to be, now there was a ragged hole leaving a hollow cave in his neck. One eye stared fixed and still ahead. The other was already gone.

Thunder cracked a whip that might have torn open the sky. Fred jumped but couldn't look away from the hamburger meat where Hal's back used to be.

"The wind is picking up," FP said, voice mild, detached, a half-step away from that kicked back tone he took when they were just kids sitting in the back of their van not wanting to go home. _Let's stay a while longer_ , he'd say after curfew came and went for Fred. _Sure, man_ , Fred would agree, knowing he'd be in for it when he got home but not caring, because it was important, sometimes, when FP didn't want to go home. His hand shot out and grabbed Fred's shoulder firmly, forcing him to look up, look away. "Hey. We need to get back in before the rain starts kicking this far in. Come on."

It bothered him that he couldn't remember if his daughter's name was Kiera or Kylie.

"Fred. We can't stay here."

That wasn't his line. FP always wanted to stay when he shouldn't and leave when Fred didn't want to watch him go.

The wind broke the rain harder east, and a wall of fast drops cut a line right up behind them, close enough for the paralyzing shock to get shoved sideways by the jump-start thought of Archie and Jughead at home.

Fred got to his feet and hurried in with FP, leaving the shirts, the table, and what was left of Hal Maddox's dead body behind in the storm.


	2. Chapter 2

For what felt like far too long after they got back inside, Fred could only stand with his back braced against the wall and stare in the general direction of FP who had his hands up attempting to block Coach Miller's path as he warned him that he did not want to go out there and see that. Miller went to the door anyway and muttered a string of swears that didn't normally make sense together but slotted nicely into a strange logic in Fred's current state of mind.

Still, Fred only listened and kept watching FP in that vague way where he didn't really see him. FP made sense. He was a thing that existed in Fred's life, a blurry figure who occasionally came into focus but always sat somewhere in his subconscious like an anchor keeping him steady or dragging him down, but there just the same. Even in that capacity, he was easier to look at than the thought of Hal Maddox out there turning into a thick paint on the concrete.

FP caught him staring and came over.

"You alright?"

He thought about Hal's daughter shaking her pom poms next to Betty, who was a common staple in his house over the years and could just as easily have become the orphaned daughter tonight, and the way he would lean over and say _Archie's looking good out there, Fred._ Just to be friendly.

"No," he replied honestly. "You?"

Instead of answering, FP looked him over and revised his answer for him, "You're alright."

The anchor gave him a tug, and for that moment anyway, it was steadying. The frozen minute that held Fred in its tight, shocked grip—and it was just that single minute for all the upside down sliding that went on in the corner of his mind that normally kept him walking in a straight line—passed. He snapped back to it.

"Call Jughead," he said as he started off down the hall. "Make sure they're inside and know what's going on."

"You should do it," FP said.

"Why?"

He stumbled over a flash of embarrassment before waving with false indifference. "He's more likely to answer."

Jughead was a good kid, a loyal one who loved his family, but he was right. Sometimes he felt that anchor dragging him down too and cut the chain when he felt the surface of the water on his chin. Fred dug out his phone and tossed it to him. FP caught it against his chest.

"Use mine," he said and hurried the rest of the way down the hall. Kenneth Nelson, the athletics director was coming out of his office at the end to see what the commotion was about when Fred excused himself and moved past him to the emergency exit.

He squinted out into the darkness trying to make out what he could see. There was no roof on that side and no paved outdoor hall. They couldn't go out that way. The cover in the front only stretched twenty feet forward with a covered side hall that only extended to the parking lot. The gym was a short walk to the right, but it might as well have been a mile with the storm raging. The athletic offices were separated from the main building by a wide, completely exposed quad. They were boxed in.

Any thoughts of going out and getting home had to be put on hold. It went against the paternal instincts that were going off like a siren in his head, but he wouldn't be any good to Archie or Jughead if he went the way of Maddox.

He walked back over where a group had gathered.

Adam Ackerman and his broad-shouldered, vacant-eyed son were in conference with Director Nelson in his office and were now standing together in front of the first office with everyone else, talking over each other for FP's attention.

Hannah Lomen was standing at the door and jumped as the security lights kicked back on after going dim and flickering off for a while. A startled half-shriek escaped her throat as the shadowy fallen figure of Maddox took on the light that patched its way through the rain to the little walkway. She flipped around, putting her back to the carnage. Her fists were balled up and white knuckled, raised to shoulder-level like she might punch the next thing that took her by surprise.

Coach Miller either wasn't concerned with the threat or didn't notice, because the light was only making him gape with a slacker jaw. He stayed put at the door and murmured a few more compound swear words. Fred caught a _shitfuck_ in there.

He walked over to FP's side.

"What do you mean it's the rain?" Alice was asking with a tone they could have sharpened a knife on.

He lifted his chin questioningly at FP.

"Call didn't go through," he said, handing his phone back to him. "No service."

"What?" A spike of fear bolted through him. He was counting on being able to talk to Archie and stress the severity of the situation. Jughead's joke about going up on the roof made bile rise now.

"I don't have any bars either," Hannah told them, fists still up, inched closer to her neck now as she looked at the screen of her phone gripped in one of them.

Stomach dropping, Fred asked everyone else to check. It was a little late for 911 for Hal, but there were still eight of them trapped in that building and God knew how many other people who got caught out in the rain just like Maddox. The first scream they heard had sounded from farther off.

No one had service.

"Do you have landlines?" he asked and caught the brief look of confusion that crossed Adam Jr.'s face. In a couple of generations, the entire concept of landlines was going to fall away in new kids' lexicons to the graveyard housing VCRs and Blockbuster.

Miller pointed at Director Nelson, almost accusatory as he said, "He had the last one."

Nelson explained, "The school phased them out in this building. Calls go to the main office and get transferred to our cells."

Fred rubbed his forehead in frustration. "Okay. Somebody will call for help over there. We just have to wait."

"How do you know they'll call?" Alice asked.

He thought of that first distant scream. "They'll call." Glancing over his shoulder to be sure, he asked, "Is this everybody?"

Hannah nodded. "Coach Rhodes and Terrence left to get food out of the vending machines a few minutes ago. Before it started raining," she added as much to herself as to them. She still had her back to the door and wasn't in a rush to reintroduce the image of what was out there in her mind, especially applied to her coworkers.

With a scoff that muted them all, Alice held her hands out and demanded, "What do you mean it was the rain?"

Fred and FP looked at each other, but he didn't know how to answer.

Alice was winding herself up. "He obviously had an accident. You misread the situation. It was not the rain. It couldn't have been. That doesn't make any sense."

Fred wanted that to be true badly enough that he let himself entertain the idea of just going along with her. Sure. None of it was true. He could walk out the door and, shielded by his own denial, he wouldn't even notice himself dying as he walked out to his truck.

"It's the rain," he said calmly. "We just have to wait it out."

FP's eyes flicked to him and then back to the floor.

"But," Hannah flailed for words for a minute and only managed an emphatic, " _how_?"

She doubled as the cheerleading coach and a chemistry teacher, which probably made her the scientific authority in a room full of construction workers and journalists. It didn't fill him with much confidence about finding an explanation if she was clueless.

"Chemical plant explosion?" Miller suggested.

Hell if Fred could explain away sudden acid showers. "There isn't one anywhere near here. I haven't heard anything in the news."

"Maybe it just happened," Adam suggested. Big Adam.

"And what?" FP said doubtfully. "It evaporated and poisoned the rain right off the bat?"

Alice raised a dismissive hand. "If it's all the same, I would rather not be dependent on FP Jones' encyclopedic knowledge of science. If I need something to fill a thimble, I'll tap that well first."

Fred dropped his head back in exasperation. Good to know the emergency was already inspiring them to be their best selves.

FP gestured to the door sarcastically. "You know, Alice, you're right. Maybe it's not the rain. Why don't you go for a walk and come back and let us know?"

She rolled her eyes and crossed her arms, and Fred thought it was pretty fitting that they were stuck in a high school.

Fred caught him by the arm and turned away from Alice rather than engage. "Come on."

"Hey—"

"If you say she started it, I will make you stand in the corner, because I _cannot_ manage five year olds right now."

FP opened his mouth but thought better of it and raised his hands in surrender, letting Fred pull him away farther down the hall out of Alice's blast range. Without the easy target to take shots at—Fred wasn't sure if it was habit or stress relief—Alice turned to confer with Director Nelson on the remarkable incompetence of eliminating landlines. Fred admired her commitment to shoveling her way under people's skin. He didn't have the stamina to start that many fires. Then again, he might have been able to find the energy if the burn felt good. He and Alice had a different relationship with fire.

"It's got to be centralized, right?" FP asked.

There was something like fear in his eyes that worried him. Fear was the first sign of smoke with him. It made him reckless. If left to itself, it could turn into a wildfire, because FP was his own sort of pyromaniac.

Fred squeezed his shoulder and tried to fan the smoke. "I'm sure Jellybean is fine."

He nodded in a distracted way that didn't instill a lot of confidence that the smoke had cleared.

"Hey! Hey!" Hannah had gotten herself to look back out the glass and now she gestured for the others to join her with frantic flips of her hand.

Fred walked over with the others and saw what had caught her attention. The main building was still lit up, and from this vantage point, they were a quad apart from the lower level office lobbies where glass walls and doors made it easy to see a group of parents who had wrapped up their meetings standing grouped together in conversation just inside the doors. If they got their attention, they could get them to call for help if no one on that side had noticed the problem yet.

The others got the idea too.

"Stay in here," Ackerman ordered Little Adam, and the rest of them stepped out under the cover of the roof.

Hannah waved her arms high over her head and began jumping up and down in spastic jumping jacks like she was demonstrating a new and terrible routine for her girls. "Hey over there! Hey, you!"

"Hey—ugh," Coach Miller broke off mid-holler as he stepped too far forward and got a grim closeup view of Hal Maddox's dissolving, steaming flesh. He turned to the side, moving his head away with one hand across his mouth, still waving one arm, but the attempt fell apart as his stomach made a rumbly noise of protest and launched his last health food snack out onto the ground with a wet slap. From the color, Fred guessed carrots.

"This is ridiculous," Alice said as Nelson and Ackerman joined Hannah on the frontline to bellow uselessly at the other building. "They can't hear us."

Behind the closed doors, it would have been hard to get their attention without a megaphone anyway. Throw in the storm pounding down at top speed, and their little calls for help were getting buried before they even carried ten feet.

Worse than knowing they couldn't reach them was the realization he made next. Taking several steps forward, he squinted through the rain. FP caught his arm and held firm, but Fred wasn't trying to keep walking. He saw what he needed to see. One of the men just inside the door had opened his umbrella in the building.

_Bad luck_ , a little voice said.

"They're coming out," Fred murmured, and even though the storm wiped out his words, FP understood.

"Jesus."

"We need..." Fred turned around, mind whirling. "We need to be louder. We have to—" And it clicked. He grabbed Coach Miller's arm and steered him back into the building. "You're coaches. You guys have whistles, right?"

"Yeah. Yeah, we do."

Hannah got the picture and shot past them into her own office. She came back out with three as Nelson and Miller hurried to their own offices. Adam Jr. tried taking one from her, but his father snatched it from him and ordered him again, more emphatically, to stay inside. Fred and Alice took the other two and hurried back out.

An awful hopelessness rose up inside of him, tinged with that familiar sting of impending failure. He stood on his share of tracks and watched the train come. It wouldn't stop without being derailed, and he didn't think a handful of silver whistles were going to upend the two hundred steel ton disaster heading straight for them.

They blew the whistles anyway and shouted over the rain, or through it, beneath it, caught under the deafening power of its onslaught. The others, minus Adam Jr., came out behind them and started blowing their own whistles. Arms waved, voices shouted over each other with pleas to call for help and stay inside, and it all fell into a special category of useless, one that Fred knew well.

With FP behind him, he recalled any number of times when he had been unable to stop the poor choices being made back when FP had been the train. It wasn't once, and it got to be a terrible cycle of watching his best friend rise up just to knock himself down again. He fell down harder and farther every time he took another hit. His teenage years were peppered with the micro rumblings of the ground giving warning trembles as FP went off half-cocked on something, bright lights turned corners and signals lowered and flashed at crossroads when Fred tried unsuccessfully to intervene, and finally, when it was too late to do any more damage control, Fred would roll off the tracks and leave FP to do what he always did. Bullet past and crash.

"It might not even be the rain," Alice said at his side, and that was when he knew for sure that their efforts had failed. She saw it coming and was bargaining. Maddox got acid thrown on him, Maddox was exposed to something toxic; the incident was solitary. The storm was as harmless as storms ever were, and everything would be fine. Fred would have liked to play along, but he was already nearer the acceptance box.

"They're coming out," FP said at his ear.

The door opened, and there was only a couple of feet of roof cover for the first man and his companion who stepped out. She was in a bright pink rain slicker, had come prepared, and something about it felt painfully young. It wasn't his wife, he could tell even at that distance with the rain skewing his vision. She was too short and slight in tall rubber boots. She was just a kid, elven or twelve. An awful swell of desperation nearly choked him. He couldn't watch what happened to Maddox happen to a kid, and he couldn't run out in the rain to stop her. The ground gave that old familiar shake.

"No!" Hannah screamed. "Don't!"

The man stepped forward, and so did the kid at his side.

Fred jammed the whistle back between his lips and expelled the full pull of his lungs out through it. The noise rolled out loud and high, and combined with the others, the storm parted, Moses through the downpour, just enough for the warnings to cut across to them.

The man abruptly stopped, just below the last small stretch of cover. He peered through the darkness and craned his neck towards where they stood in the yellow security light.

Abruptly, they all stopped blowing the whistles and became a chorus of shouts to stop, go back, call for help, stay inside. Even Alice who didn't think it was the rain because thinking so would allow it to be true.

Hannah and Ackerman waved their arms high over their heads and jumped one after the other like plastic moles taking turns popping up to get whacked back down.

The man raised the hand not holding the umbrella handle, palm up and shook his head, unable to make out what they were saying. He shouted something back, at least Fred thought he did. The word, if a word it was, didn't cut back over with any clarity. Maybe he said 'what' or 'can't hear you'. No way to tell.

The little girl started forward to return to her father's side, and Fred's heart gave an angry clutch in his chest.

"No," FP said, much too quietly to be heard across the quad, barely loud enough for Fred to hear right in front of him, and he knew he was thinking about Jellybean in rubber boots and a slicker bright enough to see coming from down the street before her bike came into focus.

She was going to step out. _Don't._

_Don't._

One boot started to come forward, Fred's chest constricted, but the girl whipped her head around to look back in the building and with a tap to her father's arm, she took off at a run back inside the building yelling something back at whoever had addressed her inside. Fred could have sunk down to his knees in relief.

Then the man stepped out into the rain.

Fred got a blurred look at him in his unbuttoned jacket before the night swallowed him and everyone else whole. Across the way, the main building's windows all went dark at once. The security lights blipped off, and a bolt of panic shot through Fred's heart and manifested as a deep bellow off to his side. He twisted, but the sudden pitch darkness in the moonless storm obliterated his vision. He couldn't see but took a couple rocky steps back as a bulky form bumped by his side and into someone else.

A hand shot out of the dark and wrapped around his forearm, stopping his backward stumble.

The next scream didn't come from across the quad where the man with the umbrella had walked out like he expected. It came out, loud and brutal, a few feet away. Phone screens started going up: first Alice and Hannah's, then Adam Jr. raised his from where he was now hanging out the door looking alarmed by the electricity going out in the soft glow of light haloed under his chin.

The screamer was Kenneth Nelson. Adam Senior was standing over him looking stunned, and it was pretty easy to put those pieces together. Nelson must have gotten the brunt of Ackerman's panicked movement and gotten plowed sideways, out from under the roof cover and into the rain. He was on his hands and knees. His right arm was curled up to his chest, and he was making guttural howls of pain.

Fred didn't think. He saw a dry spot on the back of his shirt and grabbed it in a fist, hauling him to his feet.

"Fred!" FP warned.

He hauled him forward, supporting what he could of his weight without touching his wet and injured side. Adam Jr. cleared the way without having to be told, and Hannah held the door while Fred got him inside. Alice dodged out of their path and gave them a wide berth.

Hannah led them into her office and hurriedly shoved the stack of papers and guide books sitting on the red bench along the back wall to the floor to clear room for him. Fred got him to it, but instead of lying down, he stayed sitting and doubled over his lap still making that awful howl. It tore from his throat like something wild and dying. Fred's mouth went dry and tasted like copper.

"Light! Let's get some light," FP ordered.

Everyone rallied to comply except for Ackerman who was standing just inside the door to the office with a loose jaw. The bottom row of teeth were supported by putty. Any minute, they would sludge down to the floor, and Junior would have to help Senior collect them back into his mouth since he wasn't being drafted early today—no, he wasn't being drafted at all.

"It wasn't my fault," were Ackerman's first words.

That was how people worked. The world started with the blame game. The very first Adam sat around drinking beer with the snake and griped defensively that it wasn't his fault he had to walk around with a fig leaf over his ass, it was that bitch, Eve, who took the apple.

"He didn't have to go in the rain!"

No, he didn't. Being shoved into it had helped make that decision for him.

FP stood behind where Fred was squatting and trying to get a look at Nelson's injuries. "Shut up, Ackerman."

Rather than dissolving into silence to nurse his guilt in the corner, he chose to double down. "It wasn't my fault he went in the rain! The lights went out. You catch yourself if you lose your footing. That's what you do!"

Fred thought of FP's firm hand grabbing him after Ackerman first rammed into him and wondered if he would have caught himself without it. Maybe he would be the one on the bench making that terrible noise.

"What you do," FP warned, "is shut your goddamn mouth unless you want to see how quickly you catch yourself if _you're_ the one being thrown out in the rain."

Ackerman shut up.

"Kenneth, man, I gotta look at your arm." Fred tried coaxing him into stretching the limb out without putting hands on him. There wasn't enough light even with all of their phones pointed out at him to be sure that he wouldn't accidentally touch a damp spot or catch a spray if Nelson flailed in pain.

"Back up," FP murmured, but Fred raised a hand and stayed put.

"Kenneth. Kenneth, sit up, alright? Just sit up, so we can see how bad it is. We can help you."

He wouldn't budge. His body was curled in on itself like a coiled spring.

"Did anybody see what happened to the man with the umbrella?" Alice asked.

Hannah shrugged helplessly. "Lights went out."

"Maybe he's alright," Adam Jr. suggested. He was staying the farthest back but had a flashlight app on his phone and was doing a better job of lighting up the room than any of the rest of them by aiming it over at Nelson.

Without being prodded again, Nelson sat up. He had a horrible feeling that it wasn't him that reached him but Adam Jr.'s naive hope for the best. He wanted to shut down the idea of it being _alright_ , maybe for their benefit, maybe because being in that much pain only got worse with the taint of false optimism in the air.

The lights swiveled more directly at his injuries.

Fred's stomach did a backflip.

"Jesus Christ!" This time, FP didn't give him a choice. He grabbed Fred under the arm and hauled him up to his feet and a couple of steps back out of Nelson's immediate range.

The skin was blistering as they watched. The long sleeve button-down had been chewed through above the cuff and up to his shoulder. Long patches of skin were bubbling where the rain had seared the material into his flesh. For a sick moment, all he could do was listen to Nelson wail in agony and stare at the arm. It looked like kernels were being nuked in the microwave, but instead of blowing into fluffy popcorn, the blown area of skin gave a foaming _pop!_ and burst as the rain ate farther into the tissue.

Adam Jr.'s helpful flashlight beam whirled around and dropped as he spun to the side and relieved his stomach of its load halfway in Hannah's trashcan and half splattered across the tiled floor.

It was Alice who got it together first.

Fred felt her hands on his belt buckle while his eyes were still glued to Nelson's white but quickly turning mashed pink arm.

"You mind?" she asked without caring as she got it undone and pulled the belt from the loops. He felt it slip out without protest. "Move aside, move aside."

She pushed Hannah out of the way where she had turned to stone, fists back up at her neck.

Using some of the school t-shirts for protection on her hands, Alice made quick work of tying the belt into a tourniquet as high up on his arm as she could get. It did nothing for the shoulder damage, but it might have helped with the amount of blood he was losing.

"Help her hold him down," Fred told FP, slapping his arm as he went to Coach Miller. "First Aid kit?"

Unless they had one that came with a fully staffed hospital inside of it, he didn't see what miracle they could pull off stranded there on their own, but they had to try.

"My office."

He didn't wait for him to shake himself enough to be helpful. He took off, ran past EAT. SLEEP. BENCH. and threw his cell phone light around, feeling across the wall to get to the kit attached to it. He ripped it open to find two Band-Aids and an ice pack. That wasn't going to do much except maybe get Nelson to laugh through his suffering at the sheer futility of it.

"This isn't going to cut it." He tossed the Band-Aids down on the bench and appealed to Miller, "Is there anything else here that we can use?"

"Up," Nelson said through clenched teeth. The others were fixated on his arm, but Nelson had his head twisted away from it. Fred figured that was a good idea and followed his lead. He wasn't going to get anywhere watching his arm deteriorate.

"Up?"

Hannah finally looked away from the carnage and came around enough to remember. "These old portable buildings use the attics for storage."

"Any of the old phones?"

"Maybe."

If they still had the phone line connected, they might get lucky with the service. He wasn't going to trust anything as evasive as luck, but he'd call it a victory if they found anything stronger than a purple Band-Aid for his trouble.

"The access door is in Nelson's office," Hannah said.

Fred took off and was only slightly surprised to hear steps behind him and turn to see FP coming up to his side in the hall.

Fred was hoping for an actual door with some stairs, but a quick search revealed a trapdoor in the ceiling. They shoved Nelson's desk, scraping it across the floor until they got it underneath the trapdoor in the center of the room. FP hopped onto it and only needed a small jump to grab the handle. The ladder slid down on its own, and he hopped out of the way.

"What are we looking at here, Fred?" FP asked just like he did back when they were sophomores and got busted cutting class and trying to leave campus.

He told him exactly what he said as they sat in the principal's office waiting to see how many weeks of their lives would be dedicated to the tried-and-true reformative power of after-school detention, "I have no idea. But I get the feeling we're fucked."

He glanced down at him as Fred started up the ladder next, and even in the darkness he felt that flash of connection that reminded him that he wasn't alone with those memories. That time existed, still—simpler, terrifying, confusing, complicated—running concurrently with the present through that place Fred resented at the back of his mind for never staying quiet even when something else was screaming over it. That place that promised to keep FP safe in his memory no matter how many occasions there were when he wished he could bleach him out.

"Careful."

"Yeah, I got it." FP reached down a hand and helped Fred up as he climbed up into the narrow attic. "What are we looking for?"

An old sports medicine bag? A better stocked first aid kit? A neatly folded miracle they could shake out and take cover under?

"Anything that'll help."

That would have been easy. Easy took a vacation when Jason Blossom's body washed up and Riverdale lost its quaint shine. The town was turning into something worse. Something dark.

There wasn't standing room up there. They had to stay on their knees. The thin ceiling creaked as they crawled. His phone wasn't doing much to cut through the blackness but lit the area immediately around him. There didn't seem to be much up there at all: a box with old school shirts sticking out that probably hadn't been touched in a decade, some cobwebs that might have been spider webs on closer inspection. Up there, the storm was amplified a hundredfold. A chill went down his spine at how close it sounded beating down on the roof. There was a howl inside the wind. There must have been a window with the blinds cracked up there, because it sounded like it was coming down right over them.

He raised his phone light to look for it and froze.

"Stop."

Fred could give that to FP; he ran headlong into trouble enough times to know the difference between a suggestion and a warning. The creaking of the floorboards died as he went still.

He raised his phone up too, and the combined light made it easier to see the wide patch of roof where the rain had eaten through and was streaming in at the farthest corner. Heart going to concrete and chipping each time it thudded against his ribcage, Fred turned his phone straight up to inspect the damage overhead.

All along the attic ceiling, the cheap panels were growing dark with damp black circles like mildew had settled in and was rippling out. He met FP's eyes in the chilly suppressed glow of their phones, and the concrete began to crack in lines like the lightning that flashed through the breach until he had to remind himself that panic wasn't a heart attack, it was just confirmation that, yeah, they were fucked.

The rain was fighting its way inside. It was only a matter of time. A short amount of time before it all went to shit. They had two purple Band-Aids, no lifeline, and the entire roof was going to cave in on them.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter will be the last. I'll have it up next weekend. Thanks for reading!

The whole world was a scam. That was what it felt like the night Fred walked home from the Rollin’ Pins bowling alley where he and the band had been allowed to perform on a makeshift wood paneled stage that they had to put up themselves before their gig. They sang cover songs under the thundering boom of bowling balls slamming down spares or rolling shamefully away in the gutter at high speed. A couple of girls from school listened with soda straws between their lips, smiling up at them from the plastic chairs at their table. Fred concentrated on the music. FP smiled back at them.

That was how they burned through a lot of their weekends during junior year.

They weren’t going to be rockstars. Most of the people in the alleys, some in collared teal league shirts and others too drunk to play without the bumpers up with their laces untied on their rented shoes, didn’t even hear them under the racket and waiting game gossip while others took their turns. It was just for fun. With the mic in his hands, watching FP’s long fingers move over the guitar strings, it was fun.

Then it was walking out of the cigarette smoke into the restroom to find FP making out with one of those soda straw smiling girls with his back against a stall, and the fun went stale. Her lips, bright pink with lipstick or the cherry lollipop hanging from her fingers, moved to his throat, and FP looked up, locked eyes with Fred’s reflection in the mirror. He wanted to walk away, leave them to it. He wanted to rip FP away from her and throw him into the sink.

He stayed there just inside the door and did neither. He shouldn’t have felt that angry at FP. His buddy got a girl. That was reason for high-fives and exaggerated bragging after. His skin felt flushed with the spike in his temper, and an inexplicable chill caught hold of something deep in his chest and bit down on it until he was sure there was ice chipping off his shoulder blades and running down his spine.

FP’s hands moved over the girl, holding her by the hips and drawing her closer against him, hard and wanting as she giggled into the curve of his neck, but still he watched Fred in the mirror.

The anger was a comfort, something hot and ugly to keep him upright, so of course it fell away before it could help him out much. It was replaced by a terrible feeling of betrayal that Fred was afraid of understanding, so he didn't try. Either way, he wasn’t up for a high-five, and that hurt stutter where his heartbeat should have been made it easier to turn and leave.

He wanted to check out and go home, but it wouldn’t have been right to leave them in the lurch. Fred didn’t leave people. They finished out the set. The fever on his skin that conflicted with how cold he felt everywhere else held on even as they packed their stuff back into the van.

“Want to stop by Pop’s before I drop you off?” FP asked as he pulled open the driver’s side door.

“Nah, man. I’m walking.” He didn’t want a ride. Didn’t want a milkshake. Didn’t want to look at his best friend and pretend that there wasn’t an avalanche in his head, burying what he used to believe about himself under realities that he wasn’t ready to own yet.

FP hung on to the door, one foot hitched up to climb in and called after him as he started off down the road alone, “Fred—”

“I’m walking!”

He could have walked forever right then as long as he didn’t have to look back.

 

_I’m going to die here_ , Fred thought in the attic of the athletic offices building. Right there in Riverdale High. In the place that built him, tore him down, and put him back together again.

The rain was coming down harder than ever. It would flood at this rate. Wash people off bridges, do God knew what to them when their cars were submerged. A tow truck would drag them out of the river in the morning and only find imprints of their bodies melted into the leather seats.

“What do we do?” FP asked.

How was he supposed to know? His kid was at home alone, and he liked to think that Archie would be bright enough to stay inside the second he put two and two together, but that math might not add up until he was halfway down the porch with his skin on fire. Or Betty could get caught out in it in the yard, and Archie would run out at the first scream to help her. He raised him that way, to be kind, to help when he could, to be there for his friends. Tonight, those lessons might get him killed.

“Fred.”

“I don’t know.”

His hand sunk down to his side as he got trapped up in his own worries, and the light of his phone focused on the floor. FP’s was still raised at the ceiling where the rain was eating its way inside and already coming down in pellets where the wood had crumbled under it from the outside in.

“Twenty years in construction, you can’t figure something out?”

Fred glared up at him. “Sure. Let me just put on my tool belt and start repairing the roof. Hold the ladder while I climb it, and when I fall off dead halfway up, you can go ahead and take over for me.”

FP’s frown was deep enough to pierce the darkness.

“Well, what are we going to do then?”

Fred started to climb back down from the attic. “Help Nelson however we can.” Empty-handed as they were.

“This whole thing is going to come down, and when it does, how long do you think it will take for it to eat through the ceiling and come down on us?”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky.” Maybe pigs fly if they got enough momentum before jumping off a roof. “Maybe the storm will stop.”

FP dismounted the ladder after him, forehead creased in concern. “Before our shelter is destroyed?”

He was thinking about the roof at home and whether the boys thought to close up all the windows before the rain started.

“It’ll stop.”

“When?” FP stressed, and rhetorical or not, Fred got the message. All eight of them would be fighting over the healing powers of the purple Band-Aids by the end of the night if the answer to that question wasn’t: soon. “At least he’s not screaming anymore.”

They came back into the room where the group had dispersed to different corners. Only Alice was still standing next to the bench.

Fred told them, “There wasn’t anything up there. Listen, maybe we can make him more comfortable if we…”

A soft whimper drew his attention to Hannah’s desk where she was leaning against the side and quietly crying into her hand. Ackerman was leaning against the wall with his back to them.

Alice stepped aside and looked over at the window where rain was pounding against the glass behind the closed blinds. Ackerman was tilting one corner of a slat down and peering out into the darkness.

Alice’s lips were pressed tightly together as she stepped away from where Nelson was lying on his side. “I believe we’re past comfort.”

Nelson’s eyes were closed, and Fred almost mistook it for the relief of unconsciousness if it weren’t for the confusing rows of white peeking through his red shirt. He had the vague idea that his shirt had been blue when he left before the white slats came into enough focus to recognize them as the bottom bones in his ribcage. There was a hollow point where neither bone nor shirt sat in the center of his chest. Fred looked away before that sunken darkness became any clearer.

Alice’s hands were squeezed tightly together in front of her. “He went into shock. Doubled over again. He kept clutching his arm to his chest. It must have,” Alice cleared her throat and took another step away while Nelson’s body continued to give off a carbonated fizzled hiss behind her.

The room was starting to smell like someone was cooking raw hamburger over a pit with batteries toasting in kabobs beside it.

_What kind of grill do you have?_

Alice shook out one of the extra large t-shirts laying around and laid it over Nelson.

Her voice was even, eyebrows raised, as she said, “We need to get out of here.”

“It’s not going to rain forever!” Adam Jr. startled everyone from Hannah’s desk chair with a shrill prepubescent sounding break in his protest as nerves regressed him a few years. “Right, Dad?”

Ackerman didn’t budge from where he was still peeking through the window.

Running a hand through his hair, Fred walked out of the office and to the bank of lockers across from it, trailing down towards the door but stopping short of reaching it by several necessary feet. He wanted the distance between him and the rain to be well and good on all sides.

He leaned his back against one of the first lockers and closed his eyes, tried to do that meditation shit his doctor kept recommending whenever he brought stress up at an appointment. Breathing always came off as the world’s most useless recommendation, seeing as he was always breathing when the stress rose up in the first place, but he was ready to take that prescription for air to the pharmacy to get his mind off the hole in the roof that opened up to the black sky and looked eerily similar to the hole in Kenneth Nelson’s chest.

When he opened his eyes, FP was standing next to him, side pressed into the next locker with that shoulder tilting lean that lots of guys tried to affect to look aloof. That burned out, black eyed intensity like he was waiting to get plucked out of a lost and found box followed FP in a storm cloud; made all that trouble he got into look inevitable. Of course he fell in with the wrong people, haven’t you seen that thunderhead rolling over his truck? Clear skies weren’t his style. Fred could only remember a handful of sunny days, and even now he wondered how much of that was actually FP and how much was just Fred’s sun trying to fight for room in FP’s storm.

A laugh, short and unkind only in its regret, came out without permission, and all he could do was shrug when FP raised an eyebrow.

“What’s funny?”

Fred dropped his head against the locker and looked back at him, seeing the thousand other times he had stood just like that between classes before the warning bell rang. “Nothing. Just. To me, you’ll always be the boy who leaned over me at my locker and took detention just to flick off teachers who called me out in class.”

Surprise flicked over his features. “Hell of a throwback, huh?”

Not quite. Almost.

“You and me next to an open locker. Pass me a note with a dirty drawing on it and a few misspelled words, and we’re back.”

A ghost of a smile pushed through the anxiety. “Best time of my life.”

He’d said that before, and even with a spark of humor in his eyes there was still some piece of broken truth there that brought a microscope to those free-falling years when it was just FP and Fred jumping without looking, no chute to pad the landing when it came, 1200 feet of laughter and then nothing but the ground. FP called that time the best. All Fred could call it now was long ago. He didn’t step off a curb without double-checking his parachute now.

FP was standing just a little too close, and Fred was letting him. He was careful to keep his foot on the curb even as he remembered more than lockers and being late to class twenty years ago—yesterday.

“What are we going to do?”

He wasn’t sure on the how, but Fred knew the goal. “Get back to the boys. Whatever it takes.”

FP nodded.

Fred wondered if he would warn his seventeen year old self with a time machine and retrospect. Wouldn’t matter in the end. He was too afraid of other things back then not to ignore himself and keep on, same as he had the first time around.

Alice stepped out of the office and walked a few paces towards them before regarding them openly from down the hall. FP straightened up and stepped back out of Fred’s personal space, and she smiled the way a scorpion would have when it got its stinger in something.

“I guess some things never change,” she said.

He didn’t know about that.

“Most things do,” he replied and ignored the heat of FP’s gaze on him as he walked back over to the office.

They had to tell them what was going on. If any of them had been thinking beyond the immediate shock of finding Maddox and trying to help Nelson, they would have added it up already.

They all looked over at him as he reentered, and the words got caught in his throat halfway out. The feeling of needing to urgently say something but finding himself unable to speak took him back to that day back in high school when weekends meant stolen beer in the back of the Shaggin’ Wagon and getting into fights he wouldn’t have jumped into if FP wasn’t at the center of some crowd, often throwing the first punch. One of these days, he’d tell himself, he would just let him get his ass kicked and maybe his fist would take a little longer to curl up and swing next time. One of these days.

 

He walked home from the Rollin’ Pins bowling alley off the main road and down a side street with trees on either side that obscured the moonlight but allowed him the stars overhead.

He wanted nothing more than to get home, pull on his headphones and knock out for the next eight hours. It was probably bad news that sleeping had become a refuge, a place he could hide when the idea of being exposed scared the hell out of him. Half the time, he wasn’t sure what he needed to bury. The other half, he knew too well. That was the thing about living inside your own head. Denial only went so far. Sooner or later, reality cocked its head and forced itself on your reflection in frown lines and dark circles after sleepless nights thinking, thinking, thinking and trying to do anything else.

The van pulled up beside him a few minutes later. The headlights blew out over the empty road as it turned around the curve behind him, and Fred knew it was the van, knew the other guys had already been dropped off or left behind, knew that FP was close the way he always seemed to know, like lightning making the air go bright.

“Fred.” FP hung out the rolled down window, one hand on the steering wheel as he crawled by slowly at his side.

He kept walking, kicking gravel and walking half on the grass. It would have been easy to say hey, climb in, go to Pop’s, let the way Fred’s eyes went blue when he watched him in the mirror go forgotten. He couldn’t get that one word out. Life was like that sometimes. It choked him, made him mute like nightmares of being chased and being unable to call out for help. His tongue turned to taffy and decided that for now he would walk.

He kept pace with him. “You’re pissed. Why?”

He wanted to tell him that he wasn’t angry. Anger wasn’t their thing. Not now. He wasn’t mad about some random girl that let him go to second base in the stinking bathroom at the bowling alley. He wanted to tell him a lot of things. He also never wanted to speak to him again. That part won out for the moment.

He kept walking.

FP kept driving. The air stayed bright.

 

“How long will it hold?” Alice asked after FP told the group about the roof when Fred couldn’t.

“Hours,” Fred guessed. “Less?”

Alice frowned at him like he was very stupid, and managing his stupidity was giving her a headache. “It won’t rain for hours. We’ll be fine.”

“That’s great,” FP said since he was never very good at leaving Alice’s bait alone when it was all too easy to pick up the hook and pierce his ear with it. “I was hoping that your omniscience would hold up tonight. Fred, we’re saved. Alice is a meteorologist and a structural engineer.”

“And I still find time for the PTA,” she responded without missing a beat. “That’s the Parent Teacher Association. You know, for parents who are actually raising their children.”

FP’s face went dark.

Fred intervened. “Alice, that’s enough. We need to figure out what we’re going to do. The way I see it, we’ve got one option right now. Wait it out. Hope it passes and that someone has called for help.”

“Hope as a plan,” Alice said dryly as she messed with her phone and grew visibly frustrated, probably trying to call Betty or Polly again. “Is Plan B wishing upon a star?”

He leaned against a shelf full of fitness and chemistry textbooks. “And Plan C is the power of positivity. You may have to step out of the hand holding circle for that one, Alice. I think you ran out of gas on that front in 1998.”

She wasn’t impressed but was almost appreciative. She liked to spar. No one else had their foot on the gas pedal.

Coach Miller looked glum in one of Hannah’s chairs. Fred wanted to make him a protein shake and find him some dumbbells to juggle to get him to stop staring at his dead colleague. If he was blinking, it wasn’t often.

Ackerman spoke up from the window, “We have to get out of here.”

No one said anything, and he took their silence as a personal insult.

“We can’t stay here!” he shouted loudly enough to make Hannah flinch mid-sob and stop crying from the surprise of it like a good scare interrupting a flow of hiccups.

Fear could jolt a person out of a stupor. Or it could make them dumb. Fred got the impression that Adam Ackerman was the kind of man who could do more to help in a crisis by stretching out and relaxing in the stupor.

“Relax, man,” FP said, voice thin with the fatigue that only truly came with having to sit with the unknown. “We can’t go anywhere.”

“The roof is caving in!”

FP got some of the body back into his voice, replying more firmly, “There’s no roof at all out there. Losing your shit isn’t going to help anybody.”

Ackerman’s shit was pretty much lost already by Fred’s estimation.

The shirt that Alice laid on top of Nelson’s body was sunken over a misshapen, deteriorating cavity. The rain had eaten through the thin cotton over his chest. Ackerman saw that, and if his shit wasn’t already lost, he sent it out into the middle of the wilderness without a compass now.

“I’m not staying here and waiting to die!”

Fred squeezed the bridge of his nose and wished for hot chocolate or soup, something to calm his stomach and warm him up. “Speeding up that process is better? Come on, Ackerman. Let’s sit tight and wait for help. It’s coming.”

“You don’t know that. What do you know? Not that. I’ll tell you what I know.”

Alice’s arms crisscrossed back over her chest. “This will be a fun thirty seconds. Don’t use contractions, and you may be able to pad out a full minute.”

Definitely soup. Warm soup, a comforter, a game on the TV, his son in sight: he was a simple man with simple wishes.

Ackerman was too focused on being completely unfocused, gaze diving this way and that at all of them as he raged, to pay her snark any attention. “If we stay here when that roof collapses, we’re worse than Nelson. That won’t be a trip in the rain. It’ll be a shower!”

FP said, “Oh, so now he tripped? You didn’t push him. I think they call that revisionist history.”

FP could stay here and fight with Alice and take on Ackerman, and Fred could go down the hall and wait this out in one of the empty offices alone.

_One of these days._

“Can we just get through this?” Was that too much to ask?

“That’s exactly what I plan to do. We have to get away from here. It can’t be everywhere, so I’m going where it’s not. It’s not on this side of the building.”

Fred didn’t like how amped he was getting. Panic was one thing. Hysteria was its own animal, and not one that he was looking to tame.

“How do you know that?” Alice asked.

“Because the window is fine.” Ackerman grabbed the string on the blinds and yanked it so they flew up to the top of the window noisily. Rain was pounding against it, but unlike the roof and probably the outer walls, it looked to be in tiptop shape.

Hannah sat on her desk and waved at it, none of the doom leaving her hunched shoulders. “A lot of acids don’t etch glass. All that proves is that it’s not hydrofluoric acid.”

Fred wouldn’t be thrilled to take a chemistry quiz without a hefty refresher course, but he agreed with the sentiment of her objection. “She’s right. You can’t see well enough out there to tell what’s going on. Until we have proof otherwise, we have to assume that we’re surrounded by this stuff, that all of it is dangerous. We can’t take the risk.”

“We didn’t see the man at the other building go down,” Ackerman protested. “Maybe he didn’t. Maybe the rain is fine over there. Maybe he walked to his car and drove home, and we’re sitting in here like a bunch of schmucks waiting to get what Nelson got.”

“Or maybe he’s dead,” FP retorted sharply. “You want to take that risk? You want your son to take that risk?”

“Dad.” Adam Jr. sat up to speak but thought better of it and slouched back down and probably would have kept slouching into the floor and to the center of the Earth if everyone would do him the courtesy of leaving the room to let him dissolve in private. “I don’t want to go out there. I can’t go out there.”

“You can and will. Your mother is at home. You don’t want to leave your mother on her own, do you? With this going on? What if she goes outside? How would she know? We know. We have to go.”

Adam Jr. blanched.

“Don’t put that on him,” Fred argued. “We all have people at home. Walking out into something we know is killing people isn’t going to do a whole hell of a lot to ensure their safety.”

“Stay out of it, Andrews. I’m taking my boy and getting out of here before it’s too late.”

FP exceeded his patience limit between trying to balance the ping pong matches with Ackerman and Alice. “Fine. Go. Just don’t splash on your way out.”

Ackerman started on the jammed window lock, alarming Hannah into jumping off her desk and clearing the area. Junior stood, chair rolling back as he hastily followed suit.

“Don’t open that window,” Fred said before turning to FP. “We can’t let him go out there. And we can’t let him take Adam Jr.”

“It’s _his_ kid.” The bite in his words might have been sharpened with a touch of that personal hair trigger he had with Fred about Jughead.

Maybe he was saying something too when he answered, “I know he is, and he’ll thank me when his kid makes it through despite him.”

The weighted silence that followed was only interrupted by Ackerman pawing at the window.

“It’s stuck!”

“Dad, please stop.”

“Mr. Ackerman.”

“Adam!”

Anything that might have given his brain a jump-start didn’t happen fast enough. He grabbed the chair his son abandoned and with a loud holler, he lifted it up and swung it into the window. The glass shattered on impact, shards falling in and scattering across the floor with little pings that got muffled by the pounding storm blowing in from outside.

Alice screamed and ducked away from the water that shot inside.

“Look! Look!” Ackerman grabbed a notebook off Hannah’s desk and shoved a half out the broken window while he guarded his body against the wall. He swung it back around, and everyone backpedaled as rain spit from the arc. “Nothing! There’s nothing. Mint condition.”

Fred’s temper at his recklessness was spiking, but he stared at the notebook in his hand anyway. It was soaked through, but he was right. It wasn’t being affected by it.

Hannah took a tentative step forward for a better look. “It’s over?”

Fred held his arm up to stop the slow crawl that she and Alice were making forward. “We don’t know that.”

“We do know that! Look right there.” Ackerman flung the notebook at Fred, and he barely managed to dodge it.

FP shouted, “Hey!”

Before Fred could get worked up enough on his own behalf, FP had Ackerman by the collar and shoved him against the wall.

“You want a really good look at what’s going on out there, why don’t you stick your head out, you dumb fuck.”

“FP.”

“We’re leaving,” Ackerman grit back and shoved him off. “Adam, let’s go.”

He didn’t move, frozen where he jumped back and shaking his head. It looked like he wanted to object out loud but forgot how to work his jaw when his father was looking at him with that wild-eyed energy.

“Now.”

“No,” Fred said for the kid. “He’s not going out there. The notebook is fine. Maybe it does mean that it’s over or that it’s only concentrated on the other side of campus. Or maybe it means ten feet out that window it starts up again, and going out will get you _killed_.”

Alice was keeping her distance back at the door now. “Yeah, Adam, breathe into a paper bag and stop breaking holes in our shelter.”

The warnings fell on deaf ears—or panicked ones, and that was worse. Ackerman caught Adam Jr. by the wrist and started hauling him towards the window. He had a look on his face that Fred had only seen a handful of times in his life. It was the kind of look that tightened a face into an expression ugly enough with desperation to distort it. The lightning flashes caught the cold glare like a search light sweeping the area and exposing the worst of what it found.

“Dad, no!”

The rest was a bustle of falling dominos that tipped in such quick succession that retrospect wouldn’t have brought any guilt at the fallout. There wasn’t any time to stop it.

Ackerman pulled Junior to the window, and he was too stunned to dig his heels in and put up any notable resistance. FP shot himself between them and gave Ackerman a hard enough shove to break the bear trap grip he had on his son’s wrist. Junior stumbled back, caught his hip on the corner of Hannah’s desk and hit the floor with a grunt and a thud. Ackerman took a swing at FP who was distracted enough by the proximity of the rain sheeting sideways into the room to catch it on his jaw. The blow knocked him to his knees.

He fell into the puddle pooling there, and Fred’s chest went cold as his blood fled from his heart. He expected to hear him cry out and see jeans get eaten away to kneecaps, down to bone, and crack FP in half like a split wishbone thrown in boiling water that eroded it to broth.

He jerked himself backwards, pants darker down his shins where they were wet. At the same time, something hard fell out of the back of his waistband and slid across the floor. Fred didn’t pay it any mind as FP clambered to his feet with hands that were already jumping to his fly to shed the soaked pants. He would have shucked them off then and there, but Ackerman got hold of that fallen piece of metal he dropped and with only the button undone, everyone in the room flinched hard and froze at the sudden blast of noise that struck them much harder from feet away than the thunder ripping open the sky.

Ackerman was pointing the gun straight at FP. The warning shot had blown a hole in Hannah’s bookshelf and thrown wooden splinters up in a quick blast. Fred’s hands hung at his sides unlike the hands of Alice and Coach Miller, which had shot up, palms out, in a defensive show of instant surrender. Junior stared up at him from the floor, mouth hanging open, but Fred couldn’t take his eyes off of FP’s wet jeans.

There wasn’t any cry of distress. The damp darker blues weren’t turning red, digging craters into the skin below. FP still had one hand on his zipper and the other up in a pacifying gesture, the universal sign to stop. Stop right there. Don’t shoot. Don’t climb out that window. Don’t kill your son.

His jeans were still blue.

“We…” Ackerman’s face was flushed with anger or fear or shock at himself in the rapid pulse of lightning. “…are leaving.”

Nobody moved, not even Ackerman and especially not Adam Jr. who had gone stiff as a marble statue where he sat half on his back.

“Okay,” Fred said, thinking of Archie at home, hoping they remembered to bring Vegas in before it started to drizzle, and deciding that getting back home mattered more than whatever happened to Ackerman outside that window. “You go ahead. Go alone.”

The gun jerked towards Fred at the emphasis, but he wouldn’t let that part go; wasn’t going to watch some poor kid get dragged out in that because his father wasn’t good in a crisis, which was an extremely padded way of saying he completely lost his shit at the first sign of trouble. He was smart enough or dumb enough or scared enough to know not to risk it, and Adam Jr. needed someone to advocate for him since his father wouldn’t.

“I’m not leaving my son.”

FP took a small step forward, not enough to actually threaten him or put him in a spot tight enough to spook his finger into pulling the trigger, but it got the gun pointed back at his chest, and Fred figured that was the point. As much as FP screwed up—and bringing a gun hidden under his Serpents jacket onto a school campus was a new level of that—it was his gun, and Fred knew from the way his chest had gone cold at the cruel insta-thought of FP being subjected to what Nelson went through when his knees hit the ground that FP wouldn’t have Fred get shot with his gun. It didn’t make him feel safe, but it made him feel sure. FP would take a bullet before Fred did.

“Adam will be fine here,” Fred spoke calmly from a place in his mind where survival instinct handed out assignments for his mouth: tone cool/nonthreatening, neutral, be something that Ackerman can reflect. “You go, and if the coast is clear when you get to your truck all you have to do is call and let us know. We’ll send Adam right after you. It’s better to be sure, right?”

Ackerman’s left eye twitched, a tick he never noticed on him before, a tick that probably wasn’t there while he was sitting across from Adam’s teachers and talking him up like a show dog: wouldn’t you know it, he doesn’t even piss on the carpet when I walk him through the obstacle course, and he’ll be drafted early for the Puppy Bowl if he gets drafted at all.

Fred had enough paternal instinct to naively hope in that moment of pause that it would be enough for Ackerman to agree and be on his way, jump out the window into the night where neither he or the gun would be seen again until morning or later or never.

“The phones are out,” he said instead.

He couldn’t hold on to his sanity worth a damn, but his memory was keeping up.

“That’s fine,” Fred said. “You’ll honk twice once you get in your truck, so we know you made it and it’s clear. Then Adam will follow you, and we’ll all go home. And either way, your son will be safe.”

That had to matter to him. Even now when reality had shifted enough on him to throw him off the course of normal assholery and leveled him up to this chair throwing fiasco.

Ackerman stared at Fred, then down at his son, and out at the rain. The idea of not making it to send that signal had the gears turning. Unfortunately, they turned in a brand new unwanted direction. In fact, they just about rusted stuck with his next order.

“You go,” he said to Coach Miller. He tossed his keys at him from his pocket. They hit Miller’s chest, but he made no play to catch them and they hit the floor with a clang.

“Oh that’s just great—” Alice tried to protest, but Ackerman cut her off, hollering to shut up.

“You go,” he repeated.

He wouldn’t send FP, because he couldn’t trust him to let him know it was okay or to spit on him if he was on fire. He wouldn’t send Fred, because there were obvious sides here and Fred’s position was pretty clear. Miller had no reason not to help all of them if he could. Maybe it was for that reason or maybe the idea of getting away from Ackerman, the gun, and the leaky roof were too appealing, because he bent over and picked up the keys.

An awful knot started to twist him up. “You don’t have to do this.”

“He does,” Ackerman said, watching them all beneath a knitted brow. He would shoot them. It was a hardness in his slit eyes that removed any doubt from Fred’s mind. If it came to it, he’d blow a hole in all of them before the one in the roof could do any real harm.

Miller made his way to the window and tested the rain with another book, this one a fitness handbook with a smiling kid on the front and the words Be Strong Inside and Out printed in block letters. He pulled it back and waited. The ink had smeared and bled, leaving only Be Inside behind. If that wasn’t a cosmic joke, coincidences were having a laugh.

The pages were wet but not damaged.

“I’ll honk twice,” Miller said and cut his hand on a piece of glass climbing out the window into the storm. His blood ran pink on the jagged barb and trickled down into the puddle below.

They waited inside for that double tap sound that said it was okay.

The only sound was the rain.

Two hours later, Adam Jr. grabbed a book off the shelf with the bullet hole and skirted close enough to the window to toss it out. He shone his phone with the flashlight app out, and they all bunched up behind him to look, all but his father who chose to aim the gun at the crowd’s general direction from across the room instead. They squinted out in the darkness for two minutes straight without being able to make out more than how far out the book had landed. Twenty feet. Twenty-five. The phone couldn’t cut through the storm. It was a lightning flash that lit up the trees and far away gym that wasn’t a walkable distance away, Fred decided, it was fifty miles, at the least, and kept stretching farther the longer the storm went on, unreachable.

The book sat where it flapped the concrete, not wet but boiling. Its pages were coiling in on itself, becoming soup where steam like a light fog was wafting up from the ground as far as the lightning allowed them to see.

After another hour, Fred stopped thinking about not hearing the double honk and started wondering why they hadn’t heard Miller’s last screams.


	4. Chapter 4

Fred stood with his arms spread instinctively in front of Alice and Hannah as Ackerman passed their tight-knit cluster against the wall. He had FP by the back of the jacket with the barrel of the gun pressed against his temple and used the cool press of metal to puppeteer him forward and out of the office. Adam Jr. watched his father go from the floor where his jittery legs had given up trying to stand and left him to sit with them splayed out in front of him.

An itchy discomfort had started at the base of Fred's spine and crawled up the back of his neck where tension was beginning to pull his muscles taut. Ackerman fell apart faster than could be reasoned with, and a sense of urgency was beginning to build faster than the pour of rain outside. Going off like he was couldn’t last. He was losing common sense at a speed that got cars wrapped around telephone poles and left there looking like they got smashed in a soda can crusher.

“Ackerman,” Fred followed them out into the hall.

“It’s alright, Fred,” FP said as he was forcibly walked forward towards the doors, but it wasn’t all right. They were five paces past all right and closing in on a total shitshow.

“Think about this,” he tried anyway as Ackerman ordered FP to open the doors. “Think about what you’re doing. Your son is watching.”

Well, no, his son was half a nervous breakdown away from a total stupor, but he was frozen like a sponge, still absorbing the general chaos around him. It was too bad they didn’t get trapped in the main building with the school counselor. Some levelheaded talk off the edge of a cliff might have been soothing right about then.

The gun just got pushed harder against his head, so FP opened the door. Ackerman shoved him out and closed it after him, using Hannah’s keys to lock it up. He gave it a strong jostle to test it and stalked back to the office, satisfied and pocketing the keys. There went worrying about FP. He didn’t seem too concerned that exile was a death sentence if the wind blew the rain in on him under his roof cover.

“Be reasonable.”

But Ackerman checked his shoulder as he passed him, raised the gun mildly in the women’s general direction at the doorway so they would jump out of the way and make room for him to reenter. It was back at his side, getting gripped and loosened in his hand over and over again in agitation as he started to pace the room. It made Fred think of the zoo, the way some of the animals walked the perimeter of their habitats, and you knew they would charge you or sprint back to the wild if there wasn’t a wide open-air canyon barrier stopping them.

Fred went back to the door where FP was giving it a few shakes of his own, but it was a sturdy metal door that wasn’t going to get knocked in with willpower and a shoulder ram.

“It’s coming down, Fred,” he said through the thick double-pane glass.

At first, he thought he meant the rain, because it was. The storm wasn’t letting up. Their soon-to-crumble building was sitting on a slightly elevated slope from the main building. Water was beginning to stand at the lowest point. The gutters must have been filling, burning any scurrying rodents into squealing pulp that looked indecipherable from Nelson’s gaping chest wound. He wasn’t talking about the storm, though.

The outdoor roof was thinner than what was mounted on the building. It stretched out frontward and down the sideways outer hall, but it was built for shade, not to resist the chemical scratch eating through it. To demonstrate to his anxiety that it had a right to be there, the eroded far side of the front roof swung as one side cut clean through and collapsed onto the concrete noisily. Without that four feet of cover, the rain blew in farther, closer to FP. It wouldn’t be long before the whole roof out there came down and left him with no shelter at all.

Fred eyed the door with the reinforced glass. It wouldn’t be easy, but if he used something to batter it with, he wouldn’t have to get the keys off Ackerman. “I can break it.”

“He’ll shoot you.”

“Maybe, yeah. I’m thinking it’ll be easier to recover from a gunshot than for you to recover from an acid bath.”

“Don’t be an idiot.”

The only thing they needed to focus on not being was dead. That might take some sacrifices on both their ends.

Fred looked back down the dark hallway. Ackerman’s footsteps were still thudding back and forth, back and forth in thought, thoughts that weren’t thoughts but a caged wild instinct to survive at whoever else’s cost.

“I can break it,” he repeated, quiet.

FP slapped the door, and when he looked up there was a hard look in his eyes he’d seen before. Walking home from the bowling alley that night all those years ago. FP was afraid.

“Archie needs you,” he said. Fred’s heart was being put to stereo in his ears. “Jughead needs you. Don’t be an idiot for me.”

That urgency in his eyes looked too much like defeat and left a trail of bitter footsteps in Fred’s mind that led backward through time to the hundreds of days that trouble found itself on his doorstep just because FP was on it with him.

“That’s your role, right?”

But the sky was falling. Old promises not to let FP’s problems become his problems were going to be broken if the world didn’t shake itself dry soon. At least this time, FP was in trouble because someone literally held a gun to his head. There was a joke in there somewhere. If they lived, he might try to find it.

FP acquiesced, “I wouldn’t object to you getting the keys without getting shot.”

Fate wouldn’t see the fun in that, considering it was doing a hell of a job trying to kill them tonight.

“Stay dry,” he warned.

FP nodded.

Back in the office, Ackerman was hauling a stack of handbooks out the window one-by-one like Frisbees. He squinted a while, turned, paced, went back. He called for Alice who ignored him. He marched over to her, jaw tight, grabbed her arm roughly and started dragging her back to the window quickly. She tugged hard on her arm, crying out, but Ackerman had the strength of a man on a mission and didn’t so much as slow at her protest.

“Easy,” Fred called, following after.

“Look,” Ackerman ordered and thrust Adam Jr.’s bright phone into her hand so he could dig the gun into her side to hurry her up. She aimed the beam of the flashlight out. “It stopped again.”

Fred stepped up to Alice’s other side and looked for himself. All the things he’d thrown out as a test were clearly soaked, but as far as he could tell, none were disintegrating the way that first book had. No steam rose up where the water was running out or building up in crevices. Looked like a regular umbrella and rubber boots storm. Nothing sinister about it. If this thing was happening in waves, that boded well for the structural integrity of the roof. Help could evacuate them before it all came down on them.

“You’re going out next,” Ackerman told Alice.

“Oh God,” Hannah sunk into the visitor’s chair across from her desk.

Adam Jr. moaned softly on the floor like an animal who took too many licks in a back alley fight with a stray and couldn’t get comfortable enough to heal up.

Alice scoffed, and it was so perfectly Alice with the indignant disbelief of it that Fred could have imagined they were at a meeting with the school board discussing a lack of a need for a campus newspaper instead of sharing a room with a dead body and a gunman.

“I will do no such thing,” she said.

He raised the gun to her forehead and shrugged. “Then I’m sure your girls will be fine with just their father. Either way, you’re going out that window.”

“Why don’t you run to the parking lot yourself, Adam?” she snapped. “If it’s all clear, honk twice, then shove that gun up your ass.”

Ackerman’s face twisted, went ugly with its anger, and he cocked the gun. Alice stepped back quickly and bumped into Fred’s chest. He gripped both her arms and wondered how quick he would have to be to catch Ackerman by surprise, how strong he would have to be to overpower him, and how stupid he would have to be to try either with only the vague hope of not taking a fatal gunshot in the process.

“Stop!” Hannah screamed from across the room. Her palms had to be bleeding from how tightly balled her raised fists were now.

“You couldn’t,” Alice said coldly, looking him straight in the eyes. “You’ve always been a coward, Adam. You wouldn’t do well in prison.”

Fred wasn’t so sure he had the ability to think that far ahead right now. He was in survival mode, and a coward in survival mode could absolutely be a dangerous thing. He thought of Jason Blossom and how Riverdale felt different now, less safe. It felt far more possible post that murder for Adam Ackerman to shoot Alice Cooper point-blank if she didn’t basically agree to kill herself going out that window. All they had to do was ask Coach Miller.

They were saved the immediate answer to whether he would take the shot if she wouldn’t comply by the burst of noisy pounding on the entrance door.

FP was yelling for him and banging on the glass, “Fred! Fred!”

His heart played a jump-jumpjump-jump round of hopscotch in his chest at the frantic sound of his calls. It was panicked enough to throw everyone’s attention that way. With Ackerman’s focus on Alice broken, he let go of her and took off. FP had his back pressed up against the door, banging on it behind him and pressed up as hard as he could go. Fred reached the door, and lightning flashed in a rapid five round burst like the sun cut away the night in those split seconds. It lit the whole courtyard, and he immediately saw the trouble.

The forward roof had fallen away in a huge chunk where it stretched out the farthest from the first part that crumbled, and the remaining overhang had a significant hole where the rain had eaten through. The inner edges were bubbling and foaming where it continued to chew through closer to the one patch FP had left to stand in. Fred wanted him to edge out to the side hall, but he read his mind.

“Can’t run that way. It’s gone.”

Fred had to be pragmatic. X was happening, so Y needed to get done to stop FP’s total exposure. It was hard to concentrate on X or come up with Y, however, when Nelson’s wails of pain were making a circular run back through his mind. That pain would be FP’s soon, because Y wasn’t coming to him. If he went for the gun, he’d get shot and wouldn’t get FP back inside. If he did nothing, Ackerman would leave him out there to die.

Jughead flashed before his eyes with the next flicker blast of lightning, that wounded hidden piece of himself that loved his father with his whole heart despite how many licks it had taken because of him. It was easier, he figured, acknowledged, ignored, to focus on Jughead’s heart and not his own. FP didn’t have a place there anymore. Hadn’t for a long time.

Jump-jumpjump-jump.

Alice came up to the door and got up close to inspect the wreckage. She spun around and exclaimed, “For God’s sake, Adam, open the door!”

FP shot a crooked smile back, thin with inauthentic humor. “Didn’t know you cared, Alice.”

She frowned and said nothing, a retirement of combativeness that spoke more about the seriousness than the pitch blackness trying to blind them while death crept closer still.

The roof gave a loud enough groan both directly over their own heads and in the thinner cover outside to push creaky, warning aches through the drumming hiss of the rain. It was a stomach flipping sound. A slow slogging countdown that set all their internal clocks on a backward tick-tick-tick towards zero, timeout, game over. It would hit zero hardest for FP out there with two feet of difference standing between him and the slanted wind-push of wild rain.

FP’s voice was raised over the storm, but he still had it in a tightly controlled grip, trying to ward off panic before it had a chance to get him killed before the rain did. “I don’t have a lot of time here, buddy. Listen.” Thunder tried digging its claws in the sky and cracking it open. “Listen, you keep looking out for Jughead, alright? Don’t let him down like I did. You can do that for him, Fred. Doesn’t have to be for me.”

Alice looked between them and started off towards Ackerman. “What are you going to do tomorrow, Adam? When this is over, and you’ve gotten everybody around you killed? Open the damn door!”

Fred didn’t look back but knew the gun was back on her from the short pull of breath and the palpable rage coming off her. But she stopped making FP’s case.

“No matter what,” FP said. “My kids, Fred. They’re who matter.”

They were. Archie, Jughead, Jellybean: they had some good ones between them. But it wasn’t long ago that they were kids themselves. Just one lifetime gone. Just yesterday, walking home from the Rollin’ Pins, angry and terrified. Fred was used to being afraid in storms.

 

_“You’re pissed. Why?”_ FP had asked as he drove slowly beside Fred as he walked home from their small-time gig at the bowling alley where the crowd that distractedly bobbed their heads to their cover songs had already gone home with cigarette smoke in their cotton shirts and forgotten all about the way Fred stood on that cheap pop-up stage and looked out at the girl looking up at FP feeling like each bowling ball was sliding like thunder down the alleys and straight into his chest in a pileup that kept coming.

If anyone noticed at all.

Fred ignored him and walked on down the empty road. Any other cars felt the vacant dead-end mood Fred was in and steered their drivers home another route to avoid getting sucked into the black hole expanding over his heart.

“Hey.”

“Just go home, man,” Fred finally tossed back, because he needed him to leave. Needed a railroad track or a continent between them.

The brakes let out a quiet note as the van came to a stop. Fred kept walking, and the door opened and closed again behind him. The sky hadn’t gone dark, but the first pattering of drizzle started a slow fall down, more of a mist, occasionally dotted with a fat cold drop in his hair. He hoped it poured and washed out whatever the hell rotten thing was curled up and dead in his chest.

_“Fred.”_

FP caught his elbow and turned him around.

He pulled his arm free and sidestepped him, shrugging. “I’m walking, okay?”

“In the rain.”

“It’s barely raining. I think I’ll make it.”

FP’s stare got hard. He was looking for something, but there was a challenge in it. He couldn’t tell if he was looking for a fight or not. He got in moods sometimes, thought the whole world was running at him head-on and he had to make the first tackle before helmets clashed. He fought with his dad that way, kids at school, other bands with better sets.

Some days, FP just liked to fight. It wasn’t that way with Fred, not usually, but sometimes—like now—Fred waited anyway to see if all that stuff he bottled up would rear its head at him. It never really did. Fred landed in some half-space with FP, not quite able to piss him off when others hit that trigger with a light finger, and never fully able to keep him calm. There was always something missing, unidentifiable negative space that neither knew what to do with or how to acknowledge, so they didn’t. It just sat there.

_You’re my best friend, Andrews_ , he’d say on hot afternoons over cheap beer in his dad’s trailer. _You’re too much._ Those words paired up sometimes between laughs, sometimes after a suspension or after staying out all night because FP’s dad was pissed off at everyone but mostly at FP since everyone wasn’t in swinging range across from him on the sofa: too much. He’d asked what he’d meant one of those predawn early mornings when they hadn’t gone to sleep yet, legs hanging out of the back of the van, and he’d looked at him too long (too much), said _too much of a pain in my ass_ , and they’d laughed and fallen asleep with sunrise.

“You’re too much,” Fred said himself for the first time, never knowing what FP meant by it but understanding it on a sublevel of his own.

“Fine.” He started back for the van, and Fred counted it as a win that he was leaving it at that. He could sleep the night off like a bad hangover and forget the way his throat felt like it was closing up around words neither one of them wanted to hear him say.

That should have been that. They would have gone home and slept and woken up the next morning like it didn’t matter what either of them meant. That was what they always did.

But FP was the worst when it came to expectations.

“Too much what?” he asked behind him, and it wasn’t even in the realm of fair that he confronted him about it when Fred never did except the once. He got a non-answer back then anyway.

Fred stopped and dropped his head back with an exasperated exhale. Too much to live with. Too much to live without. Too much to handle. Too much trouble. He could have said any one of those things, and it would have been true.

FP was standing next to the van when he turned. The road carried out behind him, tucked between looming trees on either side. The grey and blackening sky spiked with lightning in the distance, and the air out there in the approaching storm was too charged to pretend. They both knew what they were saying every time they didn’t say it.

_He meant_ too much. _He loved him_ too much.

It wasn’t supposed to be that way, but there it was.

“You know what I’m saying. You know why I’m upset.”

It wasn’t the girl. There was always a girl. One or the other of them got a groupie at a show. There were dances and dates. Shared milkshakes with Mary or Hermione. Even Alice Cooper sometimes looked like she might lean in and kiss FP before laying into him about something—there was always something—and marching back to the school newspaper office where she would print that week’s one-star review of their latest gig in the Music & Arts section. It wasn’t about the girl.

It was about the past two weeks when things at home had gotten bad enough for FP to crash in his room every night. It was the way he accidentally fell asleep next to him on the bed while they were listening to music and neither of them said anything about it in the morning or mentioned it when it kept happening. It was about elbowing each other at the sink while they brushed their teeth in the morning because roughhousing made it easier to press into each other’s sides without making a thing of it. It was FP’s lips at his ear when he leaned in too close to tell him something in a whisper that could have been said out loud. But mostly it was the fatigue weighing down on him from fighting so hard for so long to pretend that none of the hundred big or little things they did together mattered.

FP mattered most. Denying that was a slashed tire every day. He could drag forward, but it wasn’t easy. It was loud and dangerous, and he wanted to stop.

FP admitted, “I know why.”

In the fragile space while both raced with their foot on the gas and waited to see if the other would swing the steering wheel around and skid off the road to avoid a collision, the rain picked up. It came down hard. He was drenched in seconds. Drums rumbled overhead, a slow building beat that broke into a loud boom just like the bowling balls rolling into a stack of pins over and over again at the alley.

It was the storm that made him stupid. Something in the air.

He moved, but he moved in the wrong direction. It wasn’t safe to walk towards disasters. Even if that disaster was his best friend. He maybe even would have stopped if FP hadn’t started forward. It was the storm, he decided in some mild, quiet corner of his mind. The one out there made it hard to ignore the one they created.

The rain came down harder, a higher warning, no doubt. _Stop. Don’t. No._

But FP was there, and reaching for him was an admission. There was nothing gentle in the way they grabbed each other. If they were going to confess out there under black clouds on the faded yellow line of a road closeted by trees, they were going to do it with fists in each other’s clothes and a clashing of their lips that felt less like a kiss than a _fuck you_.

Their chests pressed together as FP tilted his head and licked into his mouth. Fred pushed him hard enough for FP’s back to slam into the van and leave black-blue bruises for the morning that would match the clouds coming down on them. It felt like a fight even as Fred pushed back against him and kissed him again, harder. FP got a hand under his shirt and pulled him closer, fingers digging into his back.

Fred’s heart was pounding. Jump-jumpjump-jump.

His lips were making a slow slide down FP’s rain slicked throat when a whisper at his ear made everything stop.

“Fred…” That was it. Just his name, soft and brokenly desperate, but maybe it sounded more like ‘finally’ and fear. He pulled back. Their eyes met, and yeah, it was all way too fucking much. But he thought it would probably be worse to try to not love FP Jones. Trying now was a lost cause. It felt pretty good being lost together.

They had one year and two summers where that was enough.

Now they were older, knew better, but there was still a storm trying to take them down. Alice was right. There was an impenetrable wall between them, and FP was a lost cause. Some things never changed.

 

“You listening to me, Fred?” FP had his head turned and pressed against the glass door of the athletic offices to look at him.

The burning rain was closing in on him.

“I’m listening.” But they started on an empty road, and he couldn’t believe that road led them here, a kiss that deconstructed both their lives into something else to watching his old friend die out there all alone. That wasn’t how this thing with them was going to end. He tapped the glass. “Be ready.”

Confused suspicion stole over him as Fred turned and walked back to the office. Ackerman had a gun. Fred had a memory of the way FP looked at him that day in the mirror while he kissed someone else. It came down to who could use what they had more effectively.

He clapped his hands when he got back in the room, and everyone looked around at him.

“You ready to go for the parking lot, Alice?” he asked.

She narrowed her eyes on him like he asked her how old she was in company that she would prefer to think of her as an ethereal, ageless woman who sometimes slipped backwards from forty-something to occasionally getting carded.

“I sympathize with Jughead’s step towards orphan status,” she said, “but I’m not going out there.”

“I think Betty and Polly would make a different request, considering the circumstances.” He tucked his hands in his pockets to keep them from fidgeting nervously, and Ackerman came closer, gun rising to half-mast before falling back to his side.

Alice glared at him. “Betty and Polly will be just as motherless with a bullet as they would if I signed up for the acid bath spa treatment out there. I’ll take the death that doesn’t require I be mopped up and poured into my casket. Thank you for the input, Fred.”

“You’re going,” he replied and hoped her journalistic instincts would kick in enough for her to read between the lines of his motives. Something clicked, because she hesitated and paused long enough in her arguing to read his lips while Ackerman was glancing in the other direction: ‘layers’.

He looked at her pointedly, and after a second of bewildered staring, she decided to play along, at least while the gun wasn’t on her and no one was catapulting her out the window.

“I—Fine. Yes, I’ll go. Why not? Looks like it’s coming down in patches and waves. If I make it to the parking lot, I could be home free,” she bluffed, and Ackerman’s eyebrow went up, probably relieved to not have to make the fuss of physically tossing her out while keeping a grip on his gun. “But I’ll need a lot of layers, obviously. Just in case. I want to be covered enough to have a chance to peel off wet layers before it gets to anything vital."

“Fine. Get those shirts and go.”

Fred shook his head infinitesimally. Alice only saw because she was paying careful attention to him now while putting on a good show, aided by the darkness, of not paying him any mind.

She planted her hands on her hips with a dismissive snort. “Yes, I’m sure those short sleeves will give me an awful lot of protection. Riverdale High cotton is up to hazmat code.”

“Stop stalling!”

As Alice launched into one of her sharp tongued rebuttals, Fred used the distraction to grab one of the round glass beakers off of the supply shelf. Hannah saw and quickly dropped her eyes to the floor. He grabbed two of the t-shirts they were arguing about and hid the beaker under them as he turned back around.

“I saw some sweatshirts up in the attic,” he interrupted the heated exchange, thankfully before the gun was cocked or Alice had an aneurysm. “I’ll use the shirts to wade through any rain damage and bring them back down for you. Alice, then will you go?”

He stared at her pointedly, and she played along.

“Fine. Sure.”

Fred nodded and turned to Ackerman, seeking permission to keep him calm. “May I?”

He struggled over it. For a beat, he thought he might actually just grab Alice and throw her out the window. Instead, he took Hannah’s keys out of his pocket and ordered his son to stay put as he gestured Fred out ahead of him with the gun. He glanced back on his way out the door to see Alice and Hannah watching him like he was Coach Miller climbing out of the window and never honking the car horn.

Out in the hall, Ackerman kept the gun on Fred and tossed him the keys, waiting for him to lock the others up in the office before making him move aside to test the doorknob himself. Fred looked to FP, and in a lightning flash he saw FP looking back at him. He was running out of time. The final song of the set was starting, and then the show was over.

 

They used to write music together with a guitar strap over FP’s shoulder and a spiral notebook between them in the grass on old Henry Milligan’s farm where Riverdale met the horizon on those open acres behind the barn.

“Think we’ll be rockstars?” FP would ask, blowing cigarette smoke that wound up and dissolved before getting anywhere, the way everything in Riverdale did.

“Do you want to be?” Fred liked to play and hang out and dream without any real commitment.

He wasn’t in it for the big time. His mother called him down-to-earth. Other guys just called him boring and told him how they were going to be millionaires by twenty-five with a mansion and seven supermodel wives on rotation. Fred would listen and figured he’d run into them at the gas station every day until they died of old age. The world never seemed much bigger than that.

FP kicked the idea of fame and fortune around before strumming lightly at the guitar and dismissing it. “Nah. I don’t want things I can’t have. Except you.”

It didn’t make much sense. He had to know how he felt about him even if he only said ‘I love you’ to himself when FP wasn’t around.

“You have me.”

FP’s smile was slow to come and didn’t have much grip on believability. Even then, FP was trapped and looking in on Fred like he was on the other side of the world instead of a few feet apart. His only answer came in silence and more smoke that disappeared just like those days writing songs they wouldn’t share while trespassing just because.

 

“You could let him in,” Fred told Ackerman. They could all wait out the storm together. Even if it flooded, even if the roof caved in and help didn’t come, they could hole up together, and that would be better than this.

Ackerman’s hand wasn’t shaking. He would have been reassured if it was, if there was some sign of doubt. The gun was steady. “I won’t.”

“No.” The time for doubt had passed. “I guess you won’t.”

He climbed up the ladder to the attic, towards the storm eating its way towards them, and smelled cigarette smoke from a previous life, down there on the Milligan farm.

The roof was coming down. The hole from earlier was much larger. Wood had fallen and was being chewed through where it was damp. Debris fell in scattered heaps as he got his footing and tested the floor. They had less time than he thought. The paneling gave too much under his foot. The level wasn’t going to hold out much longer.

Ackerman stayed below with his gun pointed up and around. Fred thought again of trying to take it from him, but Archie was waiting for him at home. FP was waiting for him outside. Alice was waiting by the window.

Thunder rumbled so loudly that it sounded like it might uproot the building and spin them off like a truck caught in a funnel cloud. He dropped the t-shirts and crept over to the flooded slant, kneeling.

He held the beaker at a downward angle away from him as he dipped it into the steaming rain.

At the foot of the ladder, the keys spinning around and around Ackerman’s finger jingled. A bolt of anger shot through him at FP. If he hadn’t been so stupid and brought a gun to a student/teacher conference, they wouldn’t have been in that situation.

He didn’t want to know what Serpents business he was on that needed him to come straight over from where he was with a gun still tucked in his waistband. Without it, they could have incapacitated Ackerman the second he got twitchy and locked him in the office until the sky got some support beams underneath it. FP not being a Serpent would have changed a lot of things; would have given them more than just one year and two summers. But FP was who he was, and now Fred was going to do what he could, like always, to clean up the mess that created.

Staring up at the black sky through the rain damaged crumbling roof, he steeled himself.

The keys clang-clang-clanged.

His finger was hot where he held the top of the beaker, but the glass didn’t melt.

Clang. Clang.

Fred stood back up.

Wrapped the beaker up in t-shirts.

Left the attic to start the climb down.

The keys stopped their circular jingling. “Where are the sweatshirts?”

His stomach felt hard. Rocks built up at the base and piled up one on top of the other.

He took a step down the rung and stopped, turned sideways to look down at him. “They were too far back.” Those non-existent sweatshirts. “Got soaked. Can’t use them.”

A look close to regret crossed Ackerman’s face. “Well,” he said, and Fred was naive enough to hope he would shake himself, come to his senses, stop. “She’ll just have to get to the parking lot quick and honk that horn.”

Fred’s shoulders sagged.

“I’m really sorry, Adam.”

His eyes narrowed up at him.

Fred dropped the shirts and flung the contents of the beaker down at him. The rain hit his face and made a sound like grease popping up from a skillet. The noise that tore out of him on contact triggered an ancient nature in Fred. A wail like that would have chased cavemen into lockdown to hide from the thing that made it.

Ackerman grabbed the left side of his face and kept wailing. The keys went flying from his finger and slapped the wall, but to Fred’s immense shock, he kept hold of the gun with his other hand. The first shot went out wide and wild, blew into Nelson’s trophy case, shattering the glass and sending a soccer cup colliding into the back with its wing ripped off. The second shot hit the ladder on the rung below him, and Fred lost his grip and fell to the floor in his rush to get down. The beaker flew out of his hand and shattered across the floor.

The screams kept on, and now Fred could hear FP pounding on the door down the hall, this time in reaction to the gunshots and pained hollering. His name got drowned out by a third shot that nearly got his leg as he half-crawled forward as he got to his feet and ran for the keys. Ackerman was after him as he snatched them up and ran for the door and back down the hall.

He was almost to the end when lightning broke up the darkness, and FP hit the door.

“Fred, behind you!”

Ackerman knocked into him from behind, and he went down, twisting to his back and kicking into his body as he scooted backward and away.

The women were at the office door, looking out the thin rectangular window and trying to see what the commotion was.

Ackerman’s screams went low and seemed to echo inside Fred’s ribcage, the awful broken off cries creating a panicked lasso over his heart. He did that. He made those screams.

Adam Junior’s face replaced Alice’s in the window, and he thought he was going to be sick. Ackerman was sitting pressed up against the wall, kicking out and clawing at his face, so Fred made a mad scramble for the keys and ran for the door again. A mere two feet forward, and he pulled up short as a chunk of the ceiling caved in and dropped right in front of him. He dove back and managed to avoid the trickle down of rain running down from some higher point.

He swore and dodged back to the office door instead where the women were slapping the door and calling for him, trying two keys before the right one slid in and turned. He only just cracked it open when Ackerman got himself controlled enough to fire a shot right next to his head into the wall. Fred ducked and cowered as he turned back. Ackerman pulled his hand away from his face, and with it, with blood like threads of thick syrup, came the top layer of his skin. His left eye was drooping like a runny egg white from the socket.

Instead of going down, a shovel went through his cries and dug deep into some primal part of himself to release a crazed growl. He dove at Fred and took him down. Fred struggled beneath him, but the pain had made Ackerman wild. He had him pinned by the shoulders, bloodied pink spit running from his boiling lips. His one eye bulged down at him. Recognition was gone. He may as well have been looking up at a lion.

The left side of his face was tearing open from a rain-cut gash in his cheek, ripping up and around to reveal the jawbone. A row of teeth shown through white but turned a slick red in seconds. His tongue blistered, and the muscle bloated and hung out as he gnashed down at him.

Fred’s muscles stiffened and stopped working on him in a moment of such repulsion that he froze up below the horror. It gave Ackerman the leverage he needed to drop down on him within inches from his own face. Blood and liquefied skin hung in thick wet ropes from the skull it was pulling away from. It was millimeters away from getting on him. Fred only just managed to turn his face and twist far enough out from under him to avoid the same fate.

FP banged manically at the door. “Get off him!”

Ackerman was bigger and stronger, and dying had triggered every bit of that big strength into a final fight. Fred’s arms were shaking from the effort of pushing on his chest to keep him levered off of him. Desperation was turning his thoughts into white static. All of his concentration went into squirming away from the stomach rolling splats hitting the tiled floor beside his head.

Clang-clang-clang.

Hannah had the keys and was running for the door. She edged around the hole in the ceiling, because Fred could hear FP telling her to _come on, come on_ but couldn’t see her where he was struggling on the floor.

Ackerman’s hands felt like industrial car crushers closing in on his shoulders, and his weight was too much. He had the awful thought that Archie was going to have to say goodbye to his father with a closed casket.

_Don’t bring him down to the morgue_ , he begged. _Don’t let him see me the way I’m seeing Ackerman._

He lost his grip on pushing his chest off and cried out as Ackerman’s full weight came down on him. He clenched his eyes shut before that rotting face came into contact with his; he didn’t want to see it when it happened. From Ackerman’s mania, it would last long enough as it was. The putrid scent of melting flesh sent his stomach into nauseated cramps.

But before any pain came, before that telling hot wet drip hit his own face, Ackerman moved rapidly up and off of him. Fred’s eyes flew open to see FP standing there. He shoved Ackerman off of him so hard that he slammed into the opposite wall. He couldn’t get a good clean breath back in his lungs before FP hooked his hands under his arms and yanked him up and backward on unsteady feet.

Rough hands turned him around and patted him over, searching. His jacket was ripped off of him and thrown on the floor. There were small holes tearing into the material of one shoulder where Ackerman’s hand had been. It would have eaten through to his shirt and skin after a few more seconds. The hands kept adjusting him for a better view, patting, checking.

“You alright? _Fred._ You alright?”

Ackerman’s good eye tumbled like a pinwheel in its socket. Fingers that were skinned down to mere chicken bones at the tips shook beside his half-eaten face. A sky-cracking long roll of thunder couldn’t bury the raw pain shooting out of him in gargled bellows.

FP shook him hard.

Fred finally looked at him, standing wide-eyed and concerned in front of him.

“Hey.”

FP searched his face.

“You’re inside,” Fred mumbled, and later when his thoughts were more together, he would appreciate the benefit of having all of his faculties with him. Too easily, a few cogs could get knocked out of place and leave him stranded uselessly in shock.

FP looked out of breath, too exhausted to smile, but one large, warm hand cupped his face. “Yeah, buddy, I’m inside.”

Ackerman lunged towards them on the floor, and Fred would remember the scratchy fractured click of the exposed bones of his fingers skittering over the floor in his nightmares for the rest of his life. FP’s arm went up across his chest, pushing him against the wall at the same instant his own arm went up over his stomach to do the same. The effect was both of their backs slapping the wall right as a gunshot fired off. It hit the floor in front of Ackerman’s scramble, and he flinched back.

They both turned to find Alice holding the gun out in both hands. It was trained at Ackerman, and the bullet hit the floor far too close to him to determine whether it was a warning shot or she missed. Better to deal with him now than give Alice’s trigger finger another reason to try one way or the other.

He and FP grabbed Ackerman on either side and dragged him down the hall towards the door. He struggled and jolted one way or the other in their clutches, but it reminded Fred of a man on fire. He wasn’t fighting them. He was thrashing now entirely against the pain, trying to flee it, run right out of his body and escape.

“Hannah!” Fred called.

Alice hung back, aiming the gun in the nebulous region of anyone-who-made-any-sudden-movements-towards-her. Hannah shot forward and carefully slid past the leak in the ceiling with her back pressed against the farthest wall. They followed her and kept as close to that side as possible. Ackerman’s feet went out from under him and dragged along the tiles as they carried him on.

Hannah got the door open, and they shoved him outside. She pushed it closed and locked it. It was finally the thing that gave Adam Jr.’s system a jump-start. He crept out of the office and walked over in small, hesitating steps.

“Be careful, son,” Fred warned.

Guilt plunged into him like his rope broke mid-climb and sent him falling off the rockface at breakneck speed. Adam Jr. was pale, and there was a stain on his shirt like he might have been sick and missed the nearest trashcan. He made it past the rain, and they all moved aside at the door to let him look out even though Fred’s instincts told him to shield his eyes and not let him see his father like that for both their sakes. He wasn’t a bad man. He was just a weak one.

“Dad?”

It was too dark to see, and the darkness had grown thick and impenetrable. Fred wanted to call it a mercy, but a cluster of lightning took an ice pick to that kindness until it was chipped away entirely.

What was left of Ackerman threw himself against the door, and Adam jumped so hard that he nearly tripped backward into the leak. Fred caught him and kept a protective hand on his back as he stared horror-struck at his deteriorating father on the other side of the glass. A whimper came out of the kid that hurt that part of Fred that woke within him the first time he held Archie next to a smiling, crying Mary. He threw the rain in his face from the same place.

The roof collapsed where Ackerman had condemned FP minutes earlier. It rushed down and in on him, but the pain had stripped the sense from him or the rain had reached his brain. Instead of fleeing for the remaining cover, Ackerman turned and ran into the rain. A gasp got caught in Fred’s throat and muted under Alice’s loud swear. He disappeared into the curtain of night too far out to see. He wasn’t screaming anymore, but Adam Jr.’s were far worse.

“Dad! Dad, don’t! Dad! No!”

The storm raged on, but Ackerman was gone.

Hannah put her arms around Adam but couldn’t make him budge, and spoke up worriedly as the ceiling gave an eerie whine overhead, “Guys.”

Fred and FP got a grip on him from either side and, as they had his father, forced him to move, this time away from the door and the lethal rain beyond it.

They holed up in Coach Miller’s office away from the broken window in Hannah’s and the leak closer to the front. They got Adam under his desk, and he didn’t fight them. He sat there and cried into his knees while the rest of them cleared shelves to overturn on top of the desk and dragged things from the other offices to make a makeshift shelter inside of the office to bunker down under to wait out the storm.

Alice and Hannah jammed themselves under the desks from the other offices that they dragged in. Fred and FP sat side by side with their backs against the one nearest the door under a canopy of a turned over bookshelf with shirts and chairs on it that wouldn’t actually be much protection if the rain started pouring in from overhead, but it was better than sitting there waiting to die exposed. They could sit there and pretend they were safe for now.

The door was shut with a Riverdale sports towel shoved across the bottom in case the leak in the hall tried to flood in. They all pretended that the rain wouldn’t eat straight through the door while Hannah had packed it in down there.

“What if it doesn’t stop?” FP whispered at his ear. They were mirrors of each other: heads back against the desk, knees up, arms hanging over them. FP’s knee was pressed against his. Neither moved, though they had the space. Both pretended that not moving wasn’t a conscious decision. “What if it rains forever?”

What if the whole world was raining, melting down, leveling the Earth, leaving only nature and broken glass behind? What if Noah’s Ark sunk into acid rain and nobody was left? Fred wanted to know _why_ it was raining. Ol’ Noah escaped a flood to wash away sin. There were plenty of things worth washing away.

“Then I guess this is it,” he murmured back.

It would have been fitting even, to be stuck with FP when trouble bit too hard to get out of it. Some part of him always thought it might end up that way.

He wanted to tell him he was an idiot for bringing that gun in with him, they wouldn’t have had to throw a dying man outside in front of his son. Could have been cathartic. More than catharsis, though, he wanted a time machine, to go back to other storms: opening his window to sneak FP in his room out of the rain, cutting class under the bleachers to smoke until the cigarette got wet—and the first one, when they fought and kissed against their van and never really stopped fighting.

Another part of the ceiling caved in over the floor in the hall, closer this time. They couldn’t get out that way anymore. There was only the window now if it came to it.

He rolled his head over the desk to peer in his direction.

“You regret it, man?” he asked instead of all the accusations on the tip of his tongue.

“Regret what?”

Fred stared at the outline of his jaw in the shadows, the scruff there that he used to run his thumb across before he rolled over him and pressed him into whatever bed, couch, chair, or floor where they were sprawled out wasting time together.

“Us. All our shit.”

He could feel his smile even if he couldn’t make it out. He never had to see FP to know what was there.

“Nah,” he admitted. “I regret how our shit ended. Not the rest of it.”

Dark as it was, Fred could imagine that they were still back there, radio on with a textbook forgotten at the end of the bed.

“You?”

He thought about it. How hard it was to purge FP from the pieces of his heart that started to reject him like a bad transplant. How much of him was still there despite everything.

“Every day,” he said with a small shrug that pressed up against FP’s arm. “And not once.”

He loved those memories for what they were and hated them for what they weren’t, but he wouldn’t erase them. He couldn’t erase FP without deleting so much of himself as to become unrecognizable. It was best as it was, over and not over.

They sat that way, quiet except for the occasional sniffs from under Adam’s desk until the ceiling groaned so loudly with a clap of thunder and slap of falling debris that Fred’s muscles tightened in preparation for a downpour. It sounded like it was directly overhead. He didn’t have time to panic before FP had pushed him to the floor and covered his body with his.

The next few seconds fell over each other in absolute stillness. No leak. No roof collapsing on their cheap rigged up extra shelter. Fred’s chest heaved under the press of FP’s. He couldn’t see more than an outline, but the warmth of him was familiar; it was a time machine in itself.

“Sorry… It sounded like it was in here.”

He could feel the words as soft breath against his cheek. It would have been so easy to turn his face, pretend, rewind. Fred reached up—how many times had he done that in the past to draw him in?—and pushed him gently back.

FP sat up and took Fred’s hand to help pull him into a sitting position after him.

“Thanks.”

FP nodded, and they slipped back into the long wait. He fell into a half-doze, too alert to sleep comfortably but slipping into dreams with thin walls that were easily bulldozed at the slightest noise in the office.

Morning broke over a stillness in the office that woke him as easily as the noises had. FP had drifted off, pressed more firmly against his side with his legs out. His head was still dropped against the desk but tilted towards him, one deep breath from resting on his shoulder. Fred shook him.

“Mmm?”

“It’s quiet.”

FP’s voice was thick with sleep much deeper than Fred had managed. “What?”

“It’s not raining.”

“Alice, how long ago did it stop?” he asked as he crawled carefully out from under the shelf on stiff legs. He walked around it to face her, but she was asleep next to Hannah. No answers there. He shook them awake, and after hesitating, shook Adam too.

FP’s shirt rode up as he stretched his back out, arms up, after getting up. He was blinking against the morning light streaming through the window but went instantly alert, locking eyes with Fred, as they heard it. Sirens.

“Should we…?” Hannah started, taking one step towards the door and a bigger one back again in doubt.

“I’m not,” Alice answered.

Fred hesitated to rush out and wave anyone down either. The last thing he wanted was a last second mistake, assuming the worst was over, only to walk outside and catch a runoff from the roof gutter over his head.

“We have to,” FP said.

“Not yet.”

Everyone said their piece but Adam who kept behind them with eyes that looked determined to keep him in a daze if he couldn’t stay asleep to escape the day. Fred moved to the window. The sun was out. The ground was clear. If it weren’t for the increasing volume of the approaching emergency vehicles, he would have chalked the night up to a vivid nightmare, some result of stress and drinking.

FP came up to his side and looked out.

“What do you think?” he asked.

Their options seemed to be go out, wait, or crawl back under their hiding spots. After that storm, he was willing to admit to himself which of those options had the most appeal. He was saved the trouble of deciding on the best actual option when a woman’s voice filtered in from the entrance to the building.

“Is anyone in here? Anybody need some help?”

FP’s eyes widened as they turned simultaneously for the hall. “Hey!”

Alice bumped into him and pushed ahead, calling, “We’re back here! In here! Is it safe to come out?”

“Don’t worry!” the woman called back. “The rain went back to normal a couple hours ago. Stopped entirely a while back. You’re okay to come out!”

Alice reached for the knob, but stopped and stepped back.

“Criminals before beauty,” she invited FP.

He shot her a sarcastic smile. “I’d say ‘ladies first’, but I wouldn’t want to put Hannah in that position since she’s the only one here.”

Fred needed counseling for the night, the deaths, the carnage, and having to deal with the forever-teenage feud between Alice and FP. He pushed past them, kicked the towel out of the way, and pulled the door open.

The woman stepping carefully around the fallen debris was a paramedic. Most of the hall had wood and insulation dirtied across it. It was damp, but sat like water and wasn’t eroding anything. Hannah’s office had what must have been that massive chunk of roof that startled FP into shielding Fred earlier. It was in dire condition. Rescue workers would have to dig out Nelson’s remains. If there was anything remaining by then. They chose the right office.

“Anyone need help?”

“No. We’re fine. What’s the story?” he asked when he reached her and noticed it was Samantha Morgan who also had a kid at Riverdale High and bumped into him at the occasional school function. Not last night, fortunately for her.

There was a grim set to her face and that disbelieving shine in her eyes that must have overtaken his own features when he first got a look at Hal Maddox lying rain soaked outside.

“One man dead across the quad,” she reported. The man with the umbrella. Must not have made it very far. “We found Coach Miller out back.”

Fred was almost naive enough to hope for a split second that ‘found’ didn’t mean _found_ , but it did. She shook her head tightly, and that was that. Alice glanced at him, and he knew what she was thinking. That could have been her out that window if Ackerman had gotten his way.

“Reports all around town. Five confirmed deaths, at least two dozen injured. Most people holed up quick when they caught on.” She didn’t say what they caught on to. Fred wasn’t sure there was a what or why forthcoming. Fred could live with not knowing and a drought crisis right about then if it meant this could get categorized as a once in a lifetime fluke.

“Six confirmed dead,” FP corrected. “Kenneth Nelson is in there.”

Surprise was replaced by determined professionalism on Samantha’s face as she evacuated them and got on her radio for help.

That first step out was worse than mounting a bull after getting thrown fifty yards and trampled. Fred’s instincts were still telling him to keep cover even if logic told him it was safe from seeing all of the emergency services people maneuvering on the campus. He saw the little girl who almost stepped out into the rain and died with the umbrella man walking hand in hand with a tall woman towards a police car. It was the thought of Archie that got him going.

The roof out there was gone, and they had to step carefully over the piles that were left. It helped that so much of it must have just gotten eradicated under the downpour. There weren’t massive heaps to climb, just a maze of scraps to keep from tripping on.

Sheriff Keller got their CliffsNotes statements and hurried them off to get driven home by three deputies he could spare since the vehicles in the surrounding parking lots had been destroyed. Adam Jr. was already on his way to the hospital in the back of one of the ambulances to get checked out since he was unresponsive. Fred got the sinking feeling that he wasn’t going to be drafted next year—no, not at all.

Hannah left with a wave without looking terribly eager to meet any of them again in the near future, or ever. Alice left to check on her family without offering Fred, her neighbor, to ride along. It was just as well, because on the way to the police cars, Fred found Ackerman and needed the extra minute to settle his stomach before getting in a cruiser. ‘Found’ was _found_.

He thanked God for small mercies that Adam Jr. was already off-campus.

Ackerman looked like he climbed into a pot and didn’t notice the water was starting to boil until it was too late.

He was on his side across the concrete. The top layer of his skin was gone, leaving strings of muscle exposed over stark white bone that got cleaned under the last two hours of normal rain. His one eye remained, stuck open with a lid that melded into a brow that hung from his face like a mask that got stuck being pulled halfway off.

Fred did that.

“Would’ve been me,” FP said.

A body bag was laid out beside Ackerman, and Fred had the nauseating thought that they would need something to scrape him up with and none of it would get rid of the pink stain left behind. FP pulled his elbow towards the patrol car waiting for them.

The ride home was peppered with stop signs and mailboxes that looked like some kid drove past with a bat dipped in acid and swung into them at ninety miles an hour.

“Fred…”

He turned to him in the backseat. There was a contemplative look on his face as he stared out the window.

“…the trees.”

Fred looked out his own window and realized what he meant. There was nothing wrong with them. They looked bizarrely untouched, despite the houses in the yards they belonged to suffering severe property damage from a melted tricycle in a driveway to a lawn swing that he had to turn and look at out the back window in order to make sense of the distorted shape before it was too far behind them to see.

The rain came in patches and lapses. Could have been a coincidence. He found himself paying closer attention to each undamaged tree, unscorched grass, and full healthy hedge.

His lungs decided to hold his breath hostage as they turned onto his street and he waited to see what damage there was there. To his surprise and the relief of his burning chest, he had to squint as the car came to a stop along the sidewalk in front of his house to notice anything was wrong. There was definite roof damage. He would have to get up there sooner rather than later to prevent interior damage in the case of another storm, but it wasn’t cinders and scraps. He’d take it.

Adrenaline kicked in as he slammed the door closed behind him and ran up the driveway. He didn’t make it to the porch before the front door swung open and Archie came running out.

“Dad!”

Relief swung into him at wrecking speed, hard enough to stop him dead, eyes closing briefly to appreciate the magnitude of how good it was to see his son okay in one piece when that wasn’t the case for so many people that day. Archie was a half-step away when he reopened his eyes, and he stepped into his outstretched arms, hugging him too tightly and cupping the back of his head.

Vegas came tearing out after him, tail wagging and tongue flailing out of his mouth in excitement. Fred reached down a hand and gave him an enthusiastic pet over the head and the fur on his neck.

“Betty called right after it started raining,” Archie was saying when Fred’s blinding relief calmed enough to allow him to make sense of his rambling. “She and Veronica caught on to what was happening quicker than we did. They warned us to stay inside. I was worried. I thought you might have gotten caught out in it.”

“No. No, I’m okay.” He was great, actually, feeling Archie solid and alive in front of him. He reached an arm out for Jughead who had walked down the steps much slower. He stepped in, and Fred hugged him too. He looked them alternately in the eye when he pulled back. “You two are all right.”

Archie beamed. “We’re good, Dad.”

Jughead’s smile was wry. “Yeah, we rethought the whole lightning rod experiment, considering the circumstances. There’s always the next storm.”

Fred gave the back of his neck an affectionate squeeze. “Don’t count on it.”

He didn’t plan on letting either of them out of his sight for the foreseeable future. Being in a crisis was bad enough. Worrying about where the kids were and how they were handling it was a thousand times worse.

Jughead’s gaze flicked past him and must have caught sight of FP, because that mix of hurt, hesitation, and almost defensive love quickly shadowed over his face.

“Dad.”

Fred glanced back at him where FP was walking forward slowly. “I guess the Jones and Andrews men were waiting out the storm together across the generations. Your dad saved my life last night, Jug.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Really?”

Archie looked between them with skepticism that was quickly replaced with gratitude. “Thanks, FP.”

Vegas trotted over to him for his own thanks, and FP rubbed him down.

He lifted a shoulder and shook his head. “It was a back and forth effort, really. God knows your dad saved my ass more than just once.”

History like theirs had ups and downs on a scale that started to favor one side over the years. Today it tried to balance out just a little.

Jughead walked up to him, and FP got that look on his face like he was never quite sure where he fit. He pulled him into a hug anyway. He met Fred’s eyes over Jughead’s shoulder, and Fred felt that same pull in his chest at the intensity of his stare. Time healed what couldn’t be forgotten, but it didn’t erase what it felt like to Fred to be the guy that FP looked at like that, in a mirror twenty years ago or a foot away after a night that tried to kill them.

“You’re still too much, you know that?” FP murmured.

A ghost of a smile, full of memories and regret and just that tiny touch of hope even now, crossed Fred’s lips, and he looked down at the unmarred green grass that withstood what the storm had fought to wash away.

He looked back up and nodded. “Yeah. You too.”

No matter how hard it rained, that would always be true.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The End. Thank you to everyone who read or left a kudos or comment!


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